Читать книгу Overnight Male - Elizabeth Bevarly - Страница 6

Darkness had always been Lila Moreau’s best friend. Throughout her life she had used different kinds of darkness to aid her in different kinds of ways. As a child, she knew the darkness under a bed or in a closet could protect her from her mother’s hurtful words. As a teenager, she felt the shadows of the city could shelter her from people, especially men, who wanted more from her than she was willing to give. As an adult, she used her shady character to keep others from getting too close. But this, the darkness that came with nightfall, was Lila’s favorite. Nighttime was when all the best stuff happened. It was when the world—or at least her world—came to life.

“Hey, lady, ya got a hundred bucks to spare? I ain’t been laid all week, and it ain’t cheap in this part ’a town.”

Lila growled her exasperation at having her profound—and kind of cool and gothic, if she did say so herself—musings interrupted. Okay, so maybe some of the life in her world was more of the low variety than it was of the high. She knew how to deal.

She turned from where she stood on the corner of N Street and Potomac in Georgetown and glared at the lowest-of-all-life who had emerged from the shadows behind her. He was maybe half a foot taller than her own five-four and probably outweighed her by a 150 pounds. Since he was dressed in double-knit sans-a-belt trousers and a shiny polyester shirt that was stained under each arm with perspiration, and since he clearly hadn’t bathed in days—also considering the way he’d just greeted her—he was too poorly dressed and not articulate enough to be a pimp. So Lila concluded he must just be a big scumbag. This part of the nation’s capital didn’t usually attract people like him, since it drew such a large tourist and college crowd and was home to so many of the city’s movers and shakers. (Well, okay, maybe there were one or two scumbags. Not to mention pimps.) But neither was it unheard of to find someone in Georgetown who wasn’t exactly the cream of Washington society.

“Uh, I think you’re a little out of your element here, guy,” she said to the, ah, guy. “Bubba’s Booty Barn is in Cheverly. But good news. You can take the orange line straight there and you won’t have to switch trains at all. Metro station’s that way,” she added, pointing in the general direction of Foggy Bottom, and hoping he’d take the hint.

Of course he didn’t. That would have been too easy.

Instead the guy grinned and said, “On second thought, sweetheart, maybe I won’t need that hundred bucks. You look like the kinda woman who’d be up for just about anything.”

Actually, dressed as she was from head to toe in black, complete with knit cap and gloves, what Lila looked like was a woman who was about to break in to someone’s home. Of course, there was a good reason for that. She was about to break in to someone’s home. Nevertheless, she hated it when men just couldn’t get the gist of the most basic fashion statement. Duh.

Damn. She really didn’t need a distraction like this right now. She had her schedule tonight timed down to the last second. There wasn’t any available room in it at all for a maiming.

But she knew it would be unavoidable when the guy winked at her, nodded his head toward the alley she’d been about to enter, and asked, “Whaddaya say? Do a good job, sweetheart, and I’ll give ya back half of the hundred bucks you’re gonna gimme, too.”

She smiled at him. “Oh, gosh, just keep the whole hundred, big guy. I mean, I should pay you for the privilege, shouldn’t I? A great-looking, charismatic man like you? C’mon.”

His flabbergasted expression in response to her enthusiasm was almost worth the interruption he was causing her. Almost.

It was a testament to his stupidity that he followed Lila into the alley without a speck of hesitation or suspicion. It was a testament to her skill that she unmanned him in even less than her usual five seconds. Oh, he’d still be able to father children someday. Unfortunately. After he regained consciousness. And, you know, found a woman who had the IQ of a piece of lint.

Now, then. Where was she? Oh, yeah. Darkness had always been Lila’s best friend…blah blah blah…the darkness that came with nightfall was her favorite…blah blah blah…nighttime was when all the best stuff happened…blah blah blah…that was when Lila’s world came to life.

Got it.

Brushing off the last lingering remnants of disgust at having come into contact with Mr. Scumbag quite literally, Lila looked around and assessed her situation. The alley between two rows of sleepy town houses was deserted this time of night, save the occasional unconscious—and unmanned—scumbag, and silent save the soft sigh of a late spring breeze that nudged a stray piece of newspaper from one side of the narrow pathway to the other. She gazed up at an unlit window on the third floor of one of those town houses—the one through which she would momentarily be crawling—confident that the occupant was by now fast asleep.

It would be a pretty standard breaking and entering, even though many Georgetown residents were protected by private security systems, this one included. In fact, this residence was even better protected than most, thanks to its owner’s occupation, and might prove a challenge to someone else. Someone who wasn’t familiar with sophisticated protection devices that ran on arcane power sources.

Fortunately, Lila knew everything there was to know about sophisticated protection devices. And she liked to think that she herself was something of an arcane power source.

She flexed her fingers inside the snug black leather gloves, then tucked an errant strand of blond hair back under the black knit cap she’d tugged low over her eyes. The long-sleeved, skintight turtleneck and pants hugged her body like a second skin and served two purposes. Not only did they keep her warm in the cool April night—and, it went without saying, looked fabulous on her—but there was no part of her attire that might slow her down, tangle her up, or offer purchase for a pursuer.

Not that Lila expected to be pursued—never mind purchased—but one always had to be prepared for the possibility. Never, though, had she been caught. At least, not when she didn’t want to be. She certainly wasn’t going to screw up something like this.

Effortlessly and without a sound, she scaled the side of the big brick building, finding footholds by turns in the mortar between the bricks, the rainspout and the thick ivy growing up the side. Having already dismantled the exterior part of the alarm system in the front of the town house, she was lifting the window and pushing herself over the sill within seconds. She paused, standing motionless for a moment to survey her surroundings and ensure everything was as it was supposed to be.

Enough pale blue light emanated from big, illuminated numbers on the nightstand clock to reveal a man’s horizontal form in the bed beside it. He was hunched deep under the covers, sound asleep, completely unaware of her presence. Had it not been for the low, regular thrum of his breathing and the steady rise and fall of his shoulders, Lila wouldn’t have known if he was even alive. Well, had it not been for that, and the fact that she’d scoped the place out yesterday and had seen not a single corpse lying around.

She smiled. She was about to enjoy her favorite thing about being a spy: the takedown. Silently she retrieved a pair of handcuffs tucked into her belt at the small of her back and crept across the room.

It was only after she had launched herself at her quarry that she sensed something wasn’t quite right. Unfortunately, her body was in motion by then, and although Lila Moreau was a woman of many talents, defying gravity wasn’t one of them. Before she could recover and retreat, the man who should have been sleeping was wrapping her in the covers, wresting the handcuffs from her grasp and snapping them—chink, chink—first around her wrist and then around the thick metal spokes in the wrought-iron headboard.

Immediately Lila began to fight, throwing herself completely into her assault. And even one-handed, Lila Moreau could wreak the havoc of ten men. But it quickly became evident that her adversary was more insidious than ten men, because he had her pinned to the mattress in record time. After more frantic struggling, she decided her assailant couldn’t possibly be human. And after still more frantic struggling, she knew she was right. Because she realized then that what had finally brought Überspy Lila Moreau to her knees—or at least facedown into a mattress—was…sheets. And a blanket. And a couple of fluffy pillows.

Damn. This was not going to look good on her report.

Eventually she managed to extricate herself—well, kind of, since she was still handcuffed to the bed. But even though a light had been switched on in the corner, she saw as she shoved the bedclothes off herself that there was no one in the room except her.

The furnishings were what looked like period antiques, but they seemed to be more functional than they were collectible, because all were clearly well used. Likewise, the Oriental rugs were richly colored but worn in spots, the hardwood floor beneath them polished but scarred in places. A fireplace on the other side of the room smelled faintly of burned wood, indicating it had been put to use recently. Its mantelpiece was crowded with models of wooden boats, and bisected floor-to-ceiling bookcases that were crammed full of old books. The remaining walls were hung with what appeared to be commendations of some kind and childishly executed works of art in baroque frames.

As masculine lairs went, this one was something of a departure from the ones Lila usually saw. Of course, most of the masculine lairs she saw had been decorated by men who were morally bankrupt, so there was a chance she wasn’t really in a position to judge the decor. It was nice, though, she had to admit. It made her feel…calm. Until she remembered she was shackled to the bed frame, wherein she felt more than a little pissed off.

Wondering where her target had disappeared to, she reached down into her sock for the spare handcuff key she always hid on her person for just such an emergency and had never had to use.

And discovered it was gone.

Dammit. It must have fallen out while she was trying to subdue the counterpane in the ass. No way could anyone have lifted it without her realizing it. She began to search furiously through the bedclothes as far as she could reach, but there was no sign of the key anywhere.

Great. Now she was going to have to gnaw off her hand to get away. She hated when that happened.

“It’s on the nightstand.”

She whipped around at the sound of the deeply timbred voice and saw a man lounging in the doorway. Although they’d never met personally, she knew who he was. She didn’t go around breaking in to the houses of total strangers. Who knew what kind of germs you’d pick up doing that? Lila only broke into the homes of her closest friends and enemies. And although Joel Faraday, code name Virtuoso, wasn’t exactly either of those, she did know him—as an archivist for her employer, the Office for Political Unity and Security. He was also her captor, she reminded herself. Which might cause a bit of trouble, considering the fact that he was her partner, too. At least for a little while.

What he wasn’t was what she’d expected. In all her years at OPUS, Lila had met only one archivist before tonight, but that one had been pretty much what she’d suspected all of the OPUS archivists were: a timid, wrinkled, eccentric little man she could sling over one shoulder. Joel Faraday was none of those things. Well, except for being a man. That part was obvious. Too obvious, in fact.

She guesstimated his age as mid-thirties, even though there was an air about him that suggested considerable life experience. His thick, dark brown hair hung almost to his shoulders and was shoved straight back from his forehead by a careless hand. Behind trendy, black-framed glasses his eyes were even darker than his hair, and the lower half of his face was shadowed by more than one day’s growth of beard. Slumped against the doorjamb as he was, she could only guess at his full height, but it certainly topped six feet.

And every last inch of it was very nicely put together. Broad shoulders strained at the seams of an otherwise baggy white T-shirt, and black hair sprang from the deep V-neck. Loose, dark blue striped pajama bottoms ended in bare feet, feet that were large enough to make her wonder about another fabled part of the male anatomy whose size was often compared to those, ah, appendages. One big hand was settled indolently on his hip, while the other cradled a half-empty snifter of something the color of rich amber.

“The far one,” he added, dipping his head toward the nightstand on the other side of the bed from where she was lying.

She turned her head to look where he indicated and saw the small metal key sitting on the farthest edge of the nightstand, just—

“Out of your reach,” he said. Then he grinned. “They told me you always do this. So I confess I had a little advance warning. If I hadn’t…”

He lifted a shoulder and let it drop, but left the statement unfinished. Not that it mattered. Had he not had his advance warning, he, not Lila, would be handcuffed to the bed. They both knew it. As he said, that was the way she broke in all her new partners. It was just her little way of letting them know up front that she would be the one in charge.

Not that Joel Faraday would be her partner for long. And no way would he ever be in charge. Well, not once the handcuffs were off, anyway. He would be on board for this particular part of her most recent assignment only long enough to reveal some information, impart his evaluation and share her speculation. As soon as she had everything she needed from him, she’d be completing the rest of the assignment on her own. And then she hoped to go back to working with her regular partner—which largely involved flying solo, just the way she liked it.

As she jerked her wrist against the cuff snapped snugly around it, Faraday’s grin widened. And the sooner she got back to flying solo, Lila thought with a silent growl, the better.

“I cannot believe I fell for this,” she muttered aloud.

“You were overconfident,” he said. “I’ve heard that about you.” Very matter-of-factly, he added, “And overconfidence will get you killed in this line of work.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

“What else have you heard about me?” she asked. Even though she was reasonably certain she already knew. Like checking one’s credit report from time to time, it was always a good idea to ensure one’s badass reputation was in order.

He gazed up at the ceiling, feigning deep consideration, swirling his brandy expertly in his glass without even bothering to make sure it didn’t slosh over the side. “Let’s see now,” he said thoughtfully. “What have I heard about Lila Moreau, code name She-Wolf?”

He lowered his head to look at her now, pinning his gaze on her face in a way that made hot little explosions ignite in the pit of her belly. Interesting.

“Probably,” he continued, “the same things everyone else has heard. That you’re one of the best agents—if not the best agent—we have. That you were recruited by OPUS before you even graduated from college. That until recently, your record was spotless.” When she opened her mouth to object, he quickly added, “Oh, but hey, that pesky attempted-murder thing has been all cleared up, and now you’re back to tabula rasa.”

“If I’d attempted murder, you can be damned sure I would’ve succeeded,” Lila said. “I never tried to kill anyone. Least of all him.”

Him being the big man in charge of OPUS. Or, as he was pseudo-affectionately known in the organization, He Whose Name Nobody Dares Say. Mostly because nobody knew what his name was.

“Not that everyone in OPUS hasn’t wanted to put a bullet in the guy at least once,” she qualified. “But that whole attempted-murder thing was just a desperate, trumped-up charge they hoped would turn up the heat and flush me out.”

“Yet still you managed to stay under their radar,” Faraday murmured.

“Like you said. I’m the best agent OPUS has.”

He grinned again. “I’ve also heard you’re not modest.”

“Modesty is overrated. Especially when it isn’t warranted.”

He neither agreed nor disagreed with her assessment of herself, and that bugged the hell out of Lila. What bugged her even more was that she actually gave a damn whether he agreed or disagreed with her assessment of herself.

“And I’ve heard that you’re smart and focused and dedicated,” he went on, sounding genuinely impressed, something that dulled the edge of her irritation. Which also bothered her. What did she care if he was impressed by her or not? “And that your number one goal in life right now is to bring Sorcerer to heel.”

Sorcerer was formally known as Adrian Padgett, and at one time had been an agent for OPUS himself—before turning to the Dark Side and choosing a life of crime. He’d been on their list—and on the lam—for years, and Lila was only the most recent agent trying to bring him in. So far he’d eluded her, something that had only served to make her more determined, but this time he wasn’t going to get away. Of that she was positive.

“And I’ve heard that if anyone can bring him in,” Faraday continued, “you can. Because I’ve also heard that you don’t quit until the job is done. And I’ve heard that you scare the hell out of most people. Oh, and I’ve also heard that you’re arguably the most dangerous woman in the world.”

“Arguably?” Lila echoed dubiously.

“Well, I certainly wouldn’t argue with it,” he assured her.

Smart man. “And do I scare the hell out of you?” she asked.

His eyes never left hers as he reminded her, “You’re the one handcuffed to the bed. What do you think?”

She opened her mouth to reply with a quick retort, then realized she wasn’t sure how he’d meant his remark. Was he saying he’d cuffed her to the bed because he was terrified of her? Or was he saying that since it had been a piece of cake for him to cuff her to the bed, she wasn’t scary at all?

Wow. A man she couldn’t get a read on. Lila couldn’t remember the last time she’d met one of those. In fact, she wasn’t sure she ever had.

“So you’ve heard quite a bit about me,” she said, deciding to ignore his last comment. For now. Considering the way he’d listed all her attributes, she figured her badass rep was still pretty much in place. “Do you believe it?”

This time his gaze drifted from her face and sauntered down her entire body, all the way to her toes and back again. And every last inch of her began to tingle and grow hot under his scrutiny. Wow. It had been a long time since she’d felt that, too. That immediate shudder of sexual awareness that started in the pit of her stomach and exploded outward, demanding satisfaction.

Damn. This really wasn’t a good time for her to meet a man who could do that to her. Especially one who could do it so quickly after meeting him. And do it with such amazing thoroughness.

“Well, handcuffed to my bed like that, you don’t look too dangerous,” he said. Ironically, there was something in the way he said it that made him seem very dangerous indeed.

Lila shoved her errant thoughts and feelings and tingling sexual awareness to the back of her brain and smiled at him. And she hoped like hell it was a convincing smile, and revealed none of the nervousness still quivering in her belly. “Good. Then why don’t you come over here and unlock me?”

He laughed softly as he lifted the brandy snifter to his mouth for an idle sip, taking his time to draw the liquor into his mouth, and savoring it for a moment before swallowing. Lila watched fascinated as he completed the action, wondering why she found such a simple gesture so provocative, and why it suddenly felt as if she, not he, was the one who had consumed something that seared her insides with heat. He didn’t answer her question, but when he remained rooted in place, she gathered that was pretty much all the response she was going to receive from him.

“I’d offer you a cognac, too,” he said, “but I’ve also heard you don’t drink. However, I stocked up on decaf green tea in anticipation of your, ah, arrival. If you’re interested.”

“Maybe later,” she said, thinking news traveled fast. She’d voiced that no-drinking policy and preference for decaf green tea at her sister’s house only a couple of weeks ago, and only in the presence of one other OPUS employee. “We need to go over the assignment,” she told him. She tugged at the handcuff again. “Come on. Unlock me. Joke’s on me. But now the joke’s over. Let me go.”

“Right,” Faraday said. “So you can kick my ass from here to Abu Dhabi. I’ll unlock you in a little while.”

“I’ll still kick your ass from here to Abu Dhabi,” she told him matter-of-factly. “It’ll just hurt more later.”

He considered her in that thoughtful way again as he enjoyed another sip of his drink. Another slow, thorough, fascinating, provocative, heat-inducing sip that went straight to Lila’s head. If he kept this up, she was going to be under the table soon.

“Maybe,” he finally said.

It took a minute for her to realize he was talking about the ass kicking, not the under-the-tabling. No maybe about that first one. She’d totally kick his ass, she thought. But she kept it to herself.

“So tell me what you know,” he said.

“Did you read my report?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Then you know everything I know.”

“Reports only cover the facts,” he said. “Not gut feelings. Not impressions. Not theories. So what are your gut feelings, impressions and theories on this thing?”

Faraday didn’t need to identify the thing any more than he had. Adrian Padgett had been the focus of Lila’s job for some time. Before she’d come along, he’d been arguably OPUS’s best agent. He’d operated by his own rules, to be sure—kind of like Lila, come to think of it—but he’d still stayed within the parameters of Doing the Right Thing. OPUS itself often bent its own rules to ensure political unity and security, so no one had really bothered to rein in Sorcerer, even when he started overstepping those parameters. He always collected exceptionally good intel, always bagged the bad guys, always got the job done. So who cared how he went about it?

Eventually, though, he began to stray so far beyond the parameters that there was no coming back. Several years ago Sorcerer had decided to become a free agent of sorts, and blackmailed the organization who employed him, threatening to expose it and many of its agents if he wasn’t paid millions of dollars and left alone. Had he not been such a good agent, the threat would have been laughable. OPUS was built on a framework of secrets—so many secrets that there were few in the organization who could honestly describe how it all worked.

With Sorcerer, though, as good as he was, the risk was too great to ignore the threat. Even so, before OPUS could amass the cash necessary to pay him off, Sorcerer leaked enough information to compromise dozens of assignments and agents. One assignment was so badly compromised, in fact, that the agent completing it ended up dead. Maybe the man hadn’t died by Sorcerer’s hand, but he’d died by Sorcerer’s actions. The agent had been the father of Lila’s regular partner, so there was a bit of personal vendetta involved in her desire to catch him, too.

She was surprised Faraday would want to know about her gut feelings and impressions and theories with regard to the assignment, since facts alone were the lifeblood of an archivist’s existence. There were twelve OPUS archivists in all, all headquartered here in Washington, and it was their job to keep records of every assignment ever conducted by OPUS. They were the ones who completed the final analysis and wrote up the final reports for every assignment. They looked at what went right and what went wrong during an operation and figured out why. Then they filed it all away somewhere, in case there was ever a need to reference a case again.

A case like, oh, say…Sorcerer. That guy probably had more paper and megabytes assigned to him than any other agent or event in OPUS’s history.

“You want to know my gut feelings about Sorcerer?” Lila asked. “My impressions? My theories?”

“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want to know,” Faraday replied.

She nodded. “Then maybe I’ll have that tea after all. And you might want to refill that cognac. And make yourself a sandwich. This could take a while.”