by Leslie Jones
“She’s right,” came Gabe’s voice from the doorway. He strolled in, followed by Mace. “You’re being a pussy. Shove over, Junior.”
Alex shrugged and went to sit sideways on the stationary bike. Gabe took his position in the middle of the mat. “Let’s try this again.”
She again took up a light sparring stance, putting her weight forward onto the balls of her feet. He did the same.
She felt the difference instantly. Gabe came at her with intensity, faster than she could have believed a man could move. She slipped his first punch and parried the second, stepping close to his side to land a punch to his ribs. He spun to deliver an elbow jab to her face, barely brushing her nose, and completed the turn with a rigid hand that flicked the side of her head as she ducked under it. She slapped his arm aside and came up with an uppercut, but he was no longer there. His fist bumped her temple from the right. She spun, kicking toward his knee, and he danced away. They circled again.
“Come on, Christina, take him apart!” Tag called.
“Show him how it’s done.” Gavin draped a towel around his neck and came to watch.
Their casual inclusion warmed her. Determined to prove herself, she drove forward, faking a punch to Gabe’s face. She thrust her leg between his, locking it behind his ankle, and pushed on his shoulders. The inner reaping throw should have put him on his ass, but he whipped his right foot and body back, and she missed the sweep. From his perpendicular position, he wrapped his left forearm around hers, bracing it on his right, his fist pushing upward on her elbow, locking out the joint. She couldn’t move without hurting herself. He released her, and they parted again.
Point for him.
“Not too bad,” Gabe allowed, stretching his neck a little. His eyes twinkled. “But don’t forget, we help teach combatives at Camp Peary. You’re going to have to do better than that if you want me on my back.”
Was he trying to distract her? Or was he actually flirting with her?
Either way, it made her even more determined. “I’ll put you on your ass.”
He grinned, and her eyes narrowed. Damn it! She twisted to throw a roundhouse kick, anticipating that he’d move right to avoid it. Settling her weight on her front foot, she flicked a backhand toward the face sliding into her view. He used her own momentum to push her arm past her face, using his other hand to dogleg her arm into a lock. They stared at one another, faces close, until he released her arm.
“Had enough?” he asked.
“We’ve just started. Have I exhausted you already?” He was right. Using standard tactics taught during her training would get her nowhere. She needed to take him to the ground, where her size would work to her advantage.
The team called out suggestions and encouragement.
“Elbow to the solar plexus,” Gavin called out. “That’ll shut him up.”
“Kick him in the nuts,” Tag suggested. “He don’t need ’em.”
“Bite me,” Gabe said.
They circled again. Christina spun, bringing her leg up as she’d done with Alex. As expected, Gabe caught her leg and lifted, throwing her off balance. As she fell, she kicked upward, scissoring both legs around his arm and twisting. Both of them spun to the ground. She slapped the mat with one arm as she hit, trying to pin his neck between her legs.
And then something happened. Instead of immobilizing him, she found herself flipped onto her back, his hands under her thighs and his head very nearly between her legs. He didn’t so much as twitch, but the look he sent up her body widened her eyes and sent scalding heat coursing through her.
“Damn it!” She yanked her legs. His grip held her still, but he loosened his fingers by increments, allowing her to wrench free and scramble to her feet.
He got up more slowly. “Nice move. Where’d you learn that?”
“I have a few tricks up my sleeve.”
He came at her almost before she was ready, throwing a flurry of combinations that had her scrambling to react. Finally, she threw him back a few steps, just enough to get inside his guard and smack her fist alongside his temple. His head rocked back, and she realized her control wasn’t where it needed to be. Before she could apologize, he spun her around and wrapped his arms over hers, gripping both her wrists.
She twisted her head, looking over her shoulder at him. His head was closer than she’d expected, and they ended up nose to nose. His breath fanned her face as his eyes dropped to her mouth. Without thinking about it, Christina brought her elbow straight back into his floating ribs. He grunted, and his grip loosened. She didn’t move.
“Ow.”
“Had enough?” she mocked.
He slowly shook his head, eyes dark on hers. “Not nearly enough.”
“Nice shot,” Mace said. “Any harder, and you’d’a broken him.”
“I’m tempted.” She glared at Gabe as her voice dropped to an intense whisper. “What happened to helping me with my reflexes?”
Gabe also lowered his voice. “I’m trying to. I needed to see what you could do before I—”
Alex snapped a towel in their general direction. “Get a room.”
She pulled free of Gabe’s embrace and moistened her lips, glancing around. “Unnecessary. He’s an ass.”
Mace hooted with laughter. “That’s the God’s honest truth.”
“Assholery does seem to be the general consensus,” Gabe agreed.
Even Tag’s normal scowl lightened. “Shit, I like you, Christina. You’re damned good at reading people.”
“I’m not an ass,” added Alex. “If I’d known what you meant, I’d’a thrown down with you, too.” He didn’t mean it, though. Despite the nature of his comment, sexual undertone was absent.
She turned innocent eyes to Alex. “You had your chance, farm boy. Toss me some water, would ya?”
Alex grabbed one of the bottles and lobbed it at her. She caught it one-handed, twisted it open, and drank deeply. They simply accepted her into their midst. It’s what usually happened to her in new groups, and she was relieved to see it happen now.
Except with Gabe. He remained untrusting and wary.
And yet something had happened during their sparring match that, as much as she wanted to, she couldn’t ignore. The spark Heather mentioned had unexpectedly burst into flame. They’d both felt the pull.
She shifted her new awareness into aggression. A much safer emotion.
“Gavin, are you done with the bag? Seems I have some hostility to work off.” She kept her tone light, teasing.
He half bowed, his sweeping arm inviting her to take his place.
She taped up her hands with practiced ease. For the next fifteen minutes, she worked her way around the heavy bag, funneling all of her doubts and insecurities into powerful punches, jabs, and kicks. At last, exhausted and sweaty, she dropped her hands to her thighs and bent over, sucking in air.
“Impressive.”
She turned to see Mace in the doorway. At some point, the others had finished their workouts and left. “Thanks.”
“You’ve got great form. A lot of boxers don’t get that right hook in there, but you really dig in. Are you finished with the bag? I don’t want to interrupt you.”
“Yeah, I’m done. I’m going to work some free weights.”
Mace slipped on a pair of light boxing gloves, tightening the laces with his teeth.
“Here, let me do that,” she said. “No point in struggling with it.”
Mace looked pained. “Struggle? Me?”
She laughed, tying the gloves into place. “Now try, hotshot.”
While Mace took over the bag, Christina sat on the free-weight bench, but made no move to pick up the dumbbells. What the hell had happened here? As much as she wanted to deny it, she had reacted to Gabe physically. That just couldn’t be allowed. He was a jackass, and he had no faith in he
r abilities.
“Everything okay?” Mace stopped pounding on the bag and regarded her.
“Yeah, sure. Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?”
He gave her a chiding look. “As long as you’re part of this team, your problems are our problems. Spill.”
No way was Christina telling Mace about her absurd attraction to Gabe. The first thing the sniper would do is tell his team leader. She thought fast.
“I had an interesting experience with a gray panel van in D.C. a couple of days before I flew out here. I need to call my boss to follow up.”
“Were you in an accident? Hit and run?”
Christina chewed her lip. “Not exactly.”
“What van?”
She couldn’t control a start of guilt. Closing her eyes for a moment, she reluctantly turned to where Gabe leaned against the doorjamb.
“Uh . . .”
He straightened and planted his hands on his hips as his eyes narrowed. “What van?” he said again.
“Um, nothing, really. A training exercise. Probably.” She coughed to clear the frog in her throat.
“What. Fucking. Van.” His voice had dropped to a low growl. Crap. This is what she’d been afraid of.
He closed the distance between them. Anger darkened his eyes.
“Someone tracked me the day before I flew here,” she said in a rush. “I reported it, per standard operating procedure, but when I checked with the Surveillance Center, no recruits followed me that day.”
Gabe’s brows snapped together and his mouth flattened. “And you didn’t think this was important enough to mention?”
“Truthfully, I’d forgotten about it until just now. I’ve thrown myself into this role a hundred percent.” She glanced to the side, unable to meet his eyes. Her mouth drooped.
She felt the weight of his glare. In her periphery, she saw the same expression of disapproval on Mace’s face.
“Did you get a look at him?” he finally asked.
“I saw the driver. I didn’t get much of a look at the second guy. They put a stolen plate on the van. But nothing else happened.” She forced herself to breath. “Fairfax County police investigated it, but do you know how many gray panel vans there are in D.C.?”
Gabe rubbed a hand along his forehead. “This is exactly why I don’t work with alphabet agencies. You all have your own fucking agendas, and you withhold vital information.”
Christina forced her spine straight, resentment flooding her. She’d screwed up; she knew it. But she hadn’t concealed it on purpose. “I don’t have an agenda! Except to finish this mission and never lay eyes on you again!”
She brushed past him as she exited the room, surprised when he let her leave. Stalking back up the hallway, she cursed herself for every kind of a fool. Why had she expected anything different from him? He didn’t and never would see her as an equal.
Deni looked up as she stomped into the bedroom. “What is wrong?”
“Nothing. Just a disagreement. I’m going to shower.”
“As you wish.”
What she wished was never to see Gabe Morgan again. Since that seemed unlikely, she scrubbed, rinsed off, and wrapped herself in one of Ronnie’s silk robes. She stretched out on the bed and closed her eyes. “Just for a few minutes.”
Chapter Eight
CHRISTINA FORCED HERSELF to remain still while the dressmaker pinned and sewed the satin gown. She gripped the speech she would give the following day at the joint Austrian-Concordian caucus on equality of women’s pay, practicing it aloud in English while Deni and the seamstress chatted. This polyglot event conveniently made sense of her rehearsing in English—and negated the need to join their conversation in French.
Dinner the previous evening had been strained. The camaraderie she’d been developing with the team withered under Gabe’s disapproval. He continued to believe she’d deliberately withheld the van incident from him, but it had never occurred to her that it and her mission here might be related. How could they be? Only a select few people even knew she was here. Her call to Jay Spicer had yielded no new information. This morning, she’d eaten breakfast in her bedroom, unable to face Gabe’s censure.
Princess Véronique’s ball gown needed to be altered slightly to fit Christina, taken in slightly to account for her smaller breasts and longer waist. The dress was a gorgeous burgundy wine color, and Christina had fallen in love with it on sight. The halter neckline was embroidered with a silver thread design. A crystal spray decorated her stomach. The full skirt started just below her navel, and was gathered at various points with crystal clips.
The seamstress had taken one look at her scar and tut-tutted, then whipped out a sheer silk material in the same color and had sewn, on the spot, a scarf-like drape for her shoulders that concealed her upper arm.
The fitting and alterations took two hours. At the end of it, Christina looked at herself in the full-length mirror. “Très bien,” she murmured, touching the seamstress’s shoulder with genuine appreciation. “Merci beaucoup.”
If the woman noted anything odd about her accent or was surprised by the scar, she did not show it. Discretion was part and parcel of working with the royal family, Deni had told her.
Christina gave a regal nod as Deni escorted the woman from the apartment. When she was alone, she slipped out of the dress and hung it up carefully, then pulled on a pair of yoga pants, a sports bra, and a loose, drawstring top over it—and felt like herself again. She spent the next half an hour in the gym stretching, thought about changing, and decided she deserved to be comfortable for some part of this mission.
By the time she entered the dining room, the Italian cook had laid out lunch and vanished. One by one, the operators drifted into the room behind her. The lunch menu consisted of clam chowder, lasagna, a grilled vegetable salad. Red wine. And—what on earth was that?
“Red wine marinated escargot over bowtie pasta,” Deni said, seating herself. She laid her napkin across her lap. “Apparently, it is one of Lorenza’s specialties.”
Christina sniffed at it. It smelled wonderful. “All right. I’ll bite.”
The rest of the team filled their plates and sat down.
“Comms check at thirteen hundred hours,” Gabe said. “We don’t want any surprises at the hospital. Departure at thirteen-thirty.”
There were nods all around. The teammates shoveled food into their mouths at incredible speed.
“It’s actually good,” Alex said, swallowing the escargot pasta. “I mean, I’ve eaten snails before. They didn’t taste like this.”
Christina simply shook her head. “Maybe if you took the time to taste it?”
“So,” Mace said briskly, rubbing his hands together. He smiled at Christina. “I’m bored of Alex going on and on about farming equipment, or Tag talking about his horses. Tell me an interesting story.”
“What?”
Gavin speared a slice of squash from his salad and waved it at her. “Tell us about yourself.”
She frowned. What could she tell?
“How did you come to work for the CIA?” Gabe asked. His tone was casual, but she saw the hard look in his eyes.
She cleared her throat. Was she really going to do this? Give Gabe more ammunition to use against her?
“Well, I was recruited right out of high school, so I haven’t known anything else.”
“They recruited you? Isn’t that unusual?” Mace looked genuinely interested.
“Yeah, it is.” Christina closed her eyes, remembering her initial conversation with the recruiter. “The normal application process is long and drawn out. Background checks and polygraphs, interviews and exams. They only recruit when someone has a specialized skill. A talent they need. In my case, it’s complicated.”
“I like complicated,” Alex said. He threw a snail at Mace, who caught it on
e-handed and popped it into his mouth. “Like the machinery parts on my thresher.”
“All right.” How could she sanitize the story? “My parents got involved with some . . . stuff. I got them out of trouble, but just after we . . . moved to a new city, a CIA recruiter visited me.”
The interview had been bizarre from the start.
“I hear you’re brilliant. Are you?”
“Um, no. Not really.”
“Do realize what you did? The degree of difficulty, especially at your age?”
“I know what I did.”
“Was it merely a fluke? An act of desperation? Did it excite you? Thrill you? Bore you?”
“It was kinda cool.”
“Could you do the same thing again, if your parents’ lives weren’t at stake?”
“Sure, would be a lot easier that way.”
“Do you realize how much danger you were in? I want to make it very clear. What I’m suggesting would be just as dangerous, and you couldn’t tell your parents anything at all about what you’re doing. You game?”
“The case officer who visited me sent me into a rough high school in a mostly minority neighborhood. His daughter’s school. He knew major narco-trafficking was going through the school. He gave me the starting players, then told me I had six months to tell him how the trafficking worked. No one could know what I was doing. I had no official cover. He gave me his contact data, but the CIA can’t operate inside US borders. I was on my own.”
“If you pull this off, I’ll do three things for you,” the case officer promised her. “One, your parents will win the lottery and earn $50,000 from a ticket you will buy. Two, I’ll offer you a full-ride scholarship to college, to study whatever you want, provided that three, at the end of getting your education, you come to work for us for a minimum of five years.”
“What if I fail?”
“I walk away and you never see me again. Most likely if you fail, you’ll be dead. Your parents will get $10,000, and I’ll put roses on your headstone.”
“I managed to fit in. It’s my chameleon thing,” she told them. She tucked a leg under her.