by Terry Spear
“I bet.” Her gaze swept over him. She asked in a hushed voice, “What about you? What if you have something hidden in your clothes?”
His eyes sparkled with a hint of mischievousness. “I do have something hidden in my clothes—although it won’t remain hidden for long if we don’t get this over with quickly. As far as bugs go, I’ve already swept my things. But if you want to give me a personal sweep of your own, just to be certain, I’m all yours.”
Her face flushed over the sexual innuendo. “Thanks, but I’ll pass.”
He tilted his head forward in agreement. “Hope you’re not too ticklish.” He gave her another of the boyish grins that she was beginning to recognize as his trademark. “I love what you do to me,” he said in a sexy, husky way that she was sure wasn’t all put on as he pulled something out of his pocket. Then he began to move the device down her thighs and her calves, and over her tennis shoes.
His gaze shifted to hers. “Spread your legs for me, Meara,” he said again in a lusty voice, somewhat hushed, but loud enough that if a lupus garou was listening in, he’d get an earful. And the lusty voice wasn’t in the least bit faked.
She raised her brows.
“It’s easier if you willingly open yourself up for me,” he said when she didn’t promptly comply.
She hoped she wasn’t wearing a bug, but for all the humiliation she was going through, she hoped he would find one and she wouldn’t have to clobber him.
She parted her legs for him, gave him a steely glower, and said in a sultry, sensuous way, “Is that wide enough for you?”
“Hmm, Meara, you sweet thing.”
He ran the device between her legs, nearly touching her denim-covered crotch, and she swore he was going to give her an orgasm just from the way he was sliding the device between her legs and breathing so close to her. His heartbeat had kicked up a couple of notches to match hers, and she knew her damned pheromones were spreading the word that she had the hots for him. They were making her feel as though she was about to be singed by the sun.
He positioned his free hand on the back of her head so he’d look like he was truly her lover if anyone happened to drive by and see, yet it was more to keep her in line if she balked and tried to slip out of his grasp. He brushed the detector over her crotch, and she wondered if he had to get it that close to detect a bug. Surely he didn’t need to. Besides, how could anyone have stuck one in her clothes down there that she wouldn’t have noticed?
She gave him an annoyed look, and he caught her expression and gave her a silkily satisfied smile.
He swept the device over her breasts next, grazing her nipples as it passed over them, and they tingled in traitorous response. She glanced at his face. His eyes darkened to midnight as he stared at her nipples, and she didn’t think his actions or reactions had anything to do with finding a bug.
“Hot, huh?” she murmured, attempting to get him to focus on his mission before she was so hot and wet and aching that she’d force him to do something about it.
His lusty gaze quickly shifted to hers as if she’d awakened him from his hazy trance. He gave her a wicked half smile and then continued the sweep, maneuvering the detector over her stomach, under her arms, and around her neck and head.
“Turn around,” he said, demanding, but his voice was already drenched with need.
“In the vehicle?” She couldn’t help the squeak in her voice.
“You can do it,” he whispered, his lips brushing her ear.
Now she knew he didn’t need to get that close.
In the confined space, she maneuvered around until she was on her knees.
“Hmm, Meara honey, bend over,” he prompted, sounding horny as hell, and she was certain it wasn’t an act as she bit back a hasty retort.
He slipped the device around the outside of her legs, and she shivered to think where it was going next. Then he slid it in between her legs, and if she wasn’t so damned turned on and wanting him to rub her crotch until she came, she’d wonder why he thought she could have a listening device there! Like with her breasts, she felt he was searching the area way too methodically and had gotten lost in his thoughts or something. She cleared her throat, and he finally brushed the device over her back pockets in a sensuous slide, again concentrating a little too long on that part of her anatomy for her liking.
He suddenly stopped at her left back pocket and rested the device there. She barely breathed. He maneuvered around so he could slide his hand inside, his fingers groping her ass as if he thought his hand could do a better job in the search. She was about to make a remark to that effect when he pulled his hand out.
He patted her on the bottom with way more than an innocent touch. “Ah, Meara,” he said, his voice as deep and rough as if he’d just climaxed. “We’ve got to get a room.”
“Now you say so,” she said, trying to sound as breathless and sexy as him, which wasn’t hard to do with her hormones raging out of control.
She turned around and saw him holding up the small listening device between his fingers. Her heart did a triple somersault. How and when did it get there? And who had put it there and had been listening to everything they’d said? Hell, what had she said?
For a second, she had the idiotic notion that Finn had planted it there so she wouldn’t think him a cad for feeling her up in the name of security. But despite her fleeting hope that it could be something so benign, she knew that wouldn’t be the case.
He set the bug carefully on the console between them, then leaned over the seat to sweep the ice chest and other bags.
He shook his head at her when she watched to see if he’d found any others. The notion that someone had been listening to them—well, hell, had stuck a bug inside the back pocket of her jeans—really irritated the hell out of her. And then the notion struck her—had it been done while she was wearing the jeans or before that? And if it was before that, how would the culprit have known she was going to wear these particular jeans? Her skin chilled at that thought.
Before she could recall who’d been around that might have done so, she worried that whoever was listening might think they were on to him. She said in a sultry voice, “Was it as good for you as it was for me?”
Finn turned to look at her, his expression briefly astonished until she pointed at the bug. He grinned. “You have to ask?”
Her face flooded with heat that spread throughout her body. He was just too damn good at playing the seducer’s role and making it sound genuine. She wondered how many women he had seduced in the name of keeping the nation secure. She quickly scolded herself for even going there.
He sat for some time, staring at the cars parked in the lot of the dealership. She wondered what he was waiting for, but she didn’t dare ask because of the bug sitting on the console between them.
After what seemed an eternity, he finally grabbed the handle and opened his door. “Stay here.”
Okay so she wasn’t Miss Super Spy. She didn’t have the training for covert military operations, or civilian ones either, and she didn’t have a top-secret or even run-of-the-mill secret security clearance, but he could at least take her with him or tell her what he was doing. She glanced down at the bug. She kept feeling like it was a minicamera and that whoever had stuck it in her pocket was watching her every move.
She thought back to Imposter Joe and tried to remember when he had been close enough to slip the listening device into her pocket. Master thieves could do things like that, but they often used a distraction.
And then she had it. When Finn had exited the bathroom towel-drying his head, the rest of him dripping wet and naked, that had distracted her. Imposter Joe had slipped closer to her, one hand on the rifle, the other briefly brushing her backside as if reassuring her he’d take care of her.
He was taking care of her all right. The bastard.
Finn caught her eye as he stalked across the parking lot, waved at her or maybe at his Hummer, and then brought out a checkbook.
She frowned. What was he up to?
He came back to the vehicle, opened her door for her, and said, “Come on.”
When she hesitated, he hauled her out of the car, shut the door, and whispered into her ear, “We’ve got some new wheels.”
“What?” She felt a chill cascade down her spine. Finn must know they were being followed.
He escorted her inside the dealership where his Hummer had been taken inside, she assumed for an inspection to give him a trade-in price.
“What? Why are you getting another car?”
“I like new cars.” He held her hand as if they were married or seriously engaged and pulled her into the finance office where they took seats in front of a desk. An hour later, after Finn paid for the vehicle and transferred his car insurance to the new one, they were back on the road.
“I don’t understand. The assassin knew what you were driving, right?”
“Yes.”
She stared out the window of the new Hummer as he sped further south. “But you got the same kind of vehicle. Same color and everything.”
“It doesn’t have any of the bugs. The other could very well have had a tracking device in a couple of hidden locations and a couple of listening bugs that would take too damned long to find. Plus the one he stuck in your pocket is now on the visor. This one is bug- and tracker-free.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You might have let on. I wanted him to think we didn’t know he had planted the devices on the Hummer. Besides, it was time I upgraded my vehicle.”
“You could have told me. I can act, you know. I thought I’d put on a pretty good show already.” She gave him an irritated look. She might not be one of them, a SEAL, but she could play games like these.
He wore a silly smirk. “Your acting is top-notch. In fact, I’d say it felt so real that it would have taken a miracle for anyone to know the difference.”
She stared at him for a minute and then sat back in her fresh leather seat. That’s why he had waited so long to leave the car after their “show.” He probably could hardly walk until the blood that had all run south had finally returned to his brain.
“Why didn’t you just remove the bugs?” she asked.
“He could’ve spotted me doing it. While they have my old Hummer inside the building, the man following us will think we had to have it repaired. At least that’s a possibility. He would have been hanging back, not wanting to get too close. He’d think he could track us without any difficulty. And he did for nearly a half hour. Most likely, he’ll suspect that if we got another car, it wouldn’t look anything like the one I already had.”
“You still could have told me. And you should have let me drive so you could get something to eat.”
“We’ll stop before long.”
“But I thought you planned to drive all night.”
“That’s what I wanted our listener to think. We’ll spend a few days at a furnished, unoccupied home just up the road. It has a garage and is off the main road. Hopefully, one of my friends had time to stock the refrigerator.”
She could just see them getting arrested. “So now we’re going to be house-sitting illegally?”
“I called in some favors once I arrived in this part of the country and before you came home. The house is ours for as long as we need it.” He drove for another twenty minutes and then slowed down as they came upon a group of homes overlooking the ocean. Minutes later, he was driving into a walled-in estate with a circular drive, although it had no security gates.
Knowing how expensive homes on the coast were, and as large and new as this one looked, she figured it had to have cost a fortune. Why would anyone allow perfect strangers to stay here? “Whose place is this?”
“You don’t need to know.” He drove into the driveway of the whitewashed Cape Cod house. What shocked her next was that he pulled a garage door opener out of his pocket and punched the button. The garage door opened and he drove inside, then quickly closed the door again.
“I made arrangements to use it when I located Hunter and thought I was rescuing the two of you. It’s a safe house of sorts. While no one knows where we are, it’s safe.”
“What if the guys were part of your secret society? Wouldn’t they know where your safe houses are?” She shoved the car door open.
“No. This place isn’t on the list of safe houses. It’s strictly a friend of a friend of a friend’s.”
She eyed the oversized two-car garage: neat and orderly, but obviously in use as evidenced by the tools hanging on a wall, all neatly organized on pegboard. She was certain the owners would be unhappy if she and Finn messed the place up. On the other hand, they probably had maid service and gardeners, if they could afford a place this fancy on the coast.
“Now that we found the bug, do you think Imposter Joe was the assassin?” she asked, as she followed Finn across the garage, carrying her bag while he carried his duffel bag and her rifle.
“No.”
She joined him at the door leading out of the garage to what she assumed was the house. “How can you be so sure?”
“He wanted you.”
Her lips parted, and then she laughed. “Right.”
“Yeah, he did.” Finn sounded a little more disgruntled than she would expect him to be. “If he’d been a real assassin, he would have attempted to kill the both of us. No. This guy was someone else. As soon as I can get one of our men to check out the other Joe, we’ll try to uncover just who this other guy really was.” He opened the door, which revealed a sparkling tiled kitchen.
Everything was sunny yellow, from the floor tiles to the walls. The table and cabinets were all in a honey-oak wood, and the countertop had gold and yellow streaks running through the faux marble. A bay window offered a panoramic view of the ocean, and she paused to take a look at the pines rising far above the house from way down below and the frothy waves hitting the sandy beach and striking boulders scattered along the shore. Her scenic view was different—the beach smaller, the trees framing the house even more, which she preferred because it gave more of a woodsy feel—but she liked the bay window.
“He did lie about who he was. Then the other Joe ended up dead. I just don’t see how the imposter could have been the good guy,” she continued, wanting to explore the beach, to look for seashells, to feel the sand between her toes.
She watched with fascination the way the water swirled in little eddies at the edge, pulling the sand out and tossing it back inland again, exposing precious seashell treasures in its wake.
Finn glanced over his shoulder at her. “What I want to know is how he got the bug into your pants without you knowing about it.”
She felt her face heat up all over again. “I was distracted.”
“Oh?”
She couldn’t believe Finn didn’t realize that he had been the perfect distraction.
“Yeah. Some naked guy had just taken a shower in my bathroom. And Imposter Joe, I believed, was my protection. He sort of swept his hand over my back pocket, and I thought it was a gesture aimed at reassuring me.”
Finn snorted. “The guy palmed your butt, and you don’t think he’s interested in you?”
“Right! He stuffs a bug in my pocket, and that shows how much he’s intrigued with me?”
“If he didn’t care for you, or if this was strictly a job, you would never have felt his hand on your ass.”
She took a deep breath, trying to settle the way her stomach had tightened over Finn’s irritation with her and what Imposter Joe had done. She would have argued with Finn further, but she suspected he would probably know better about matters like that. And that made her feel even more uncomfortable about Im
poster Joe.
She glanced at the sunny living room off the kitchen, with its large picture windows letting in light and the walls covered in paintings of sunny daffodils, fields of sunflowers, drifts of daylilies, and the rising sun. The tile floor was yellow, too, continuing the yellow theme from the kitchen and dining area. She wondered if the bedrooms were all yellow also.
“Looks like someone didn’t like the gloom of Oregon weather and tried to preserve the sun indoors.”
“Probably someone from California.”
She raised her eyes to the ceiling as if asking for divine intervention, and then headed for the deck door. “I lived in California, and I wouldn’t decorate my place here in Oregon like it was one giant sunflower.”
He smiled a little and then disappeared.
She glanced back, wondering what had happened to him. When he reappeared, she realized what he was up to. Checking out the place. Making sure they were alone. Alone. She’d hoped to find a mate in the next two weeks, and what had happened instead? She had been swept into a dangerous situation that Hunter and his team had been involved in, and now she was stuck alone with one of his teammates. One who was not on her list as an acceptable mate for her or any other she-wolf. Not in the line of work he was in, and as far as she knew, he wasn’t on the mate mart.
“So where are you from originally?” she asked. She noted a very large doggy door for a wolf next to the regular door, and then she walked out onto the deck, leaving the door wide open.
The air was wet and heavy. She hadn’t thought she’d ever get used to living next to the ocean after having lived in the redwoods for so long. She wasn’t good at adapting to new locations, but she was beginning to really like coastal life.
She walked back into the kitchen as Finn hauled in the ice chest and set it on the floor next to the fridge. Her rifle was already lying on the kitchen counter, and she figured later she would put it under the bed where she would sleep.
She opened the fridge and peered inside. Empty. Except for a few condiments. “Great. No food. Guess they cleaned it out before we arrived.”