Afterglow (15 page)

She breathed in the fragrant steam and hummed her appreciation, “Mmmm. Elixir of the gods.” She sipped with pleasure.

“The guy’s at least four hours ahead of us. If you were fully recovered, we could’ve gotten back on the road.”

She waved her mug at him. “When I looked in on you in the gym, you still … had issues. I went out.”

“I’m sure there’s a boutique in the hotel,” he pointed out, taking the toothpick out of a sandwich layered with what looked like every cold meat they had in the hotel kitchen, then biting into it.

Dakota’s stomach rumbled. She removed the top piece of bread from her sandwich and picked off a couple of slices of roast beef with her fingers. “With sky-high prices and no selection? I think this portion of the conversation is closed, don’t you?” She took a bite of the meat, spicy and delicious, then took another.

There went that muscle of annoyance twitching in his cheek again. “We’re here to work, not go shopping.”

“We’re here to follow a lead.” Dakota eased back more comfortably into the corner of her chair and scratched one bare foot with the other. “Not to get gassed with DL6-94, which was
never
its intended application, or to have to lock ourselves into our rooms waiting for it to wear off.” She couldn’t resist one more dig. “And we sure aren’t here in this luxury hotel to screw each other, despite appearances to the contrary. But this is where we are. So what’s next?”

They could’ve spent the last three hours having memorable sex, but for reasons she couldn’t fathom, he’d declined her offer. Clearly, Rand’s hate for her was stronger than the pull of a powerful aphrodisiac.

The realization was depressing. And irritating as hell.

Not that she was complaining—much, or not so much
anymore
, Dakota thought.

He rose from his chair and the shopping bag dropped unnoticed to the floor. Taking his coffee cup with him, he paced around the bed, then back again. He was the equivalent of a quickly tapping foot. An engine revving on idle. Coins jingling in a pocket. In other words, annoying and accomplishing nothing.

“You’ll stay here,” he finally said. “Use this as a command post. We’ll keep in close contact via phone.”

The coffee was hot and strong, just the way she liked it. Dakota held the cup between her palms and looked at him politely over the rim. “I don’t think so.”

He gave her a cold look. “You want to go back to Monaco?”

Cocking her head, she raised both eyebrows and opened her eyes wide. “Make me.”

That muscle jerked in his jaw as it always did when he clenched his teeth. “Dozens of people died today because they breathed in
your
Machiavellian creation. I’m not dragging you all over hell and gone for no reason. Obviously, the shit that went down at the wedding wasn’t about blackmail. Two acts can no longer be considered random. The next time—and there will probably be a next time—
we
might not be as lucky.”

“You need me,” she told him flatly. “It must be obvious to you now that my skill is one hundred percent accurate. I have to continue to use it if we have a hope in hell of preventing another attack.”

She peeled a chunk of ham off the open face of her sandwich and held it between her fingers. “Don’t think of me as a woman, Maguire.” The way his eyes flared made it abundantly clear that’s exactly how he saw her. She gave him a small, I-know-exactly-what-you’re-thinking smile. “Just consider me a professional GPS.” Dropping the ham into her mouth, Dakota chewed with satisfaction. After swallowing, and allowing him time to digest that, she added, “I suggest you get over your snit, change your clothes, and let’s get going.”

She drained the last of her coffee, put down her empty cup, wiped her hands, and picked up her tote from the floor beside her chair. As she plopped the heavy bag in the cradle of her crossed legs, she glanced up to see Rand just standing there, gazing at her with that inscrutable poker face he was so good at.

“And just in case, I found these.” She took out another purchase and showed him the package label. He barely spared her score a glance. “Emergency masks. They’re really for use if your house is on fire, so you don’t get asphyxiated by the smoke. They’ll work on rose-scented happy gas in a pinch as well.”

“
I
have to stop him,” Rand said tightly. He didn’t acknowledge what she thought was a halfway brilliant solution to the potential problem. He strolled over, and she braced for … what? A slap? A kiss?

When none came, she replied, “So do I.”

“Au contraire.”
He picked up the shopping bag and tossed it on the neatly made bed, then undid his pants and yanked down the zipper. “Your part of the program was unleashing this crap on the world in the first place. Mine, apparently, is to stop it from spreading.”

“The
FDA
prevented it from being
unleashed
,” Dakota informed him tightly, feeling the cold of his disdain all the way through her bones. He didn’t care about her. Not even after that manic bout of sex.

They used to
love
each other. Love each other with a depth and breadth that had at times scared her with its intensity. She’d thought in the last two years that his apathy toward her was the worst event in her life. But his contempt was far, far worse.

Especially on the heels of all those endorphins.

Enjoy your last taste, Dakota.
She knew she’d never have another.

SIX

R
and kicked off the tailored black pants. He wore a knife in a black sheath on his left ankle. That was pretty much all he wore, and it wasn’t the big knife Dakota was looking at. That was a minor detail. He was commando. His long legs curved into the tight curve of his ass and he was still almost fully erect.

“Boxers in the bag.” Mouth dry and heart rate elevated, she couldn’t tear her gaze away.

The sight of him in nothing but a once-white dress shirt and an ankle knife almost sent her over the edge. Okay, so maybe she hadn’t completely recovered from the airborne Rapture after all. She looked at the sprinkler head in the ceiling until she got her brain back. “And I wasn’t the sole person working on that formula, I’d like to remind you. There were six teams, your father being the head of one of them.”

“Why did you swear in an affidavit to the prosecutor that you weren’t the one who supplied him with the overdosed wafers?” He removed the price tags from his new clothes with his teeth.

Dakota wasn’t looking at his strong legs or mourning that the shirt hung too low for her to get a glimpse of his ripped abs and lower. His words brought her out of the brief fantasy with a thud. She must still be breathing, although she couldn’t feel the movement of her lungs as she stared at him, dry-eyed and bereft of speech for an entirely different reason.

“If you’d told the truth,” he said, unbuttoning his shirt. “I would’ve stood by you. Got you the best attorney my money could buy. All you had to do was admit you made a fucking
mistake
, that you didn’t intend the dose to be so high.”

“I should have,” she told him without expression or inflection. Because that lie would make at least
one
of them happy, and the end result was going to be the same anyway. There was already a bull’s-eye on her back.

“The trial starts in two weeks.” Watching her with a frown, he tossed the shirt on the bed and stood there gloriously, unself-consciously naked, and still semi-erect. His shoulders were broad, his chest delectably hairy, and his legs long. He had the body of a well-conditioned, honed athlete. She knew every hard inch of it, and every soft, tender spot as well.

Dakota felt absolutely nothing now. Not the clawing lust. Not anger that he hadn’t changed in the intervening years. Not even sorry that he looked at her so emotionlessly. “Okay.”

“You’ll testify on his behalf?”

“If that’s what you want.” She heard her own dull voice from a distance. “Yeah, sure.”

“Thank you.”

She blinked him back into focus, puzzled to see him dressed in the new jeans and a black T-shirt. She must’ve checked out for a few minutes. Foolish. She needed to be on her toes. Especially now. Especially around him. She reached for her cup, tipped it to her mouth, and remembered it was empty.
Get a grip.

“Are you well enough to travel? If not, I’ll leave you here, and you can call in the coordinates.”

“I’m peachy to travel,” Dakota assured him. She would be. She just needed to give herself a pep talk about blood being thicker than water and people not being able to see the truth unless it bit them on the ass. She needed to pull up her big-girl panties and remember she had a task to perform before anything else happened.

Because as bad as the bank situation was, she knew the drug had the potential to produce much, much worse.

She put the empty cup on the table, then dug her GPS and the vial container out of her tote. She had to fake this till she made it. “Let’s see where our person of interest has gotten to in the last four hours.” The moment she touched the hard case, she swore under her breath.

“Damn it to hell. The trail’s cold,” Rand said flatly. He had sat down to put on the sneakers, and he looked over at her, ready for the bad news.

“No. The trail’s still hot. The problem is, we now have
two
people to follow.” She picked one set of numbers at random, as two separate strings of digits ran through her mind like a double ticker tape. She tapped the numbers into the GPS. “One’s moving east across France. The other’s headed north.”

“Can you tell if they’re traveling by land or air?”

“Neither is fast enough to be on a plane. I suspect they know the drug is unstable and loses potency if they fly.”

“Can you track both at the same time?”

“I just did.” Not that she’d ever had to follow two trails at once, but apparently it could be done, even when her insides had been scooped out by a dull knife.
Oh, shut up, Dakota! Don’t be so dramatic.
She was a scientist. Pragmatic when she needed to be. As a realist, she’d known for years how Rand felt; this was no surprise.

One blissed-out session on a hotel floor wouldn’t change that. If the man had been in his right mind, it never would have happened.

“Christ.” Finished with the shoes, he ran a hand around the back of his neck. “We’re spread too thin. I don’t have enough manpower for this.”

“Fortunate that you have me as backup womanpower, then, isn’t it?”

“I’ll have some of my people follow one trail, you and I the oth—” His phone rang. “This could be a real lead. Speak,” he added into the phone.

They’d arrived in Barcelona following a
real
damn lead, Dakota thought darkly.

Damn it, damn it, damn it. This wasn’t nearly as easy as she’d hoped, even though she’d known it wasn’t going to be.

“SING JUST DIED,” LIGG
told Rand flatly.

“Brett Sing
died
?” The stepfather of the groom was an ass and, Rand suspected, an alcoholic. Perhaps a heart attack, or kidney failure? “Tell me it wasn’t related to the drug.”

“Sorry, boss, but the doc said yeah, it was. He was knocking back that champagne pretty good during and after the event. One of his symptoms—shit. How do I describe it? His eyes looked kinda like my grandma Ella’s. Cataracts?”

“The bloom?” He looked over to see Dakota watching him intently. At those words, the flush drained from her face, leaving her skin pasty, the freckles standing out in stark relief. Her teeth dug into her lower lip as she listened to his end of the conversation. He turned the phone to speaker.

“Yeah. His eyes turned this spooky, milky white. Docs are pretty sure it’s not E. They’re speculating it’s that new Russian drug, Krokodil. I have toxicology back, want me to text the summary report to you?”