Agent of Desire (Jessica Booker) (6 page)

“What do you want?” he asks me in French as he continues to struggle.

“To keep you safe,” I reply in English.

“Lori?” His struggling lessens. “You were supposed to go to Notre Dame.”

“Yeah, I know. I saw the party you had waiting for me there. I decided to skip it.”

“Please, what do you want?”

“I told you. I want to keep you safe.” I put the gun down out of his reach and flip him over. I straddle him, holding his arms at his sides.

He’s scared, but he also looks sad, betrayed. “Then why do you keep on breaking in and attacking me?”

It’s a valid question. One I might ask as well. “It’s complicated,” I say.

“I’m smart. I’ll try and keep up.”

Even though I’m the one holding him down, he demands that I explain it all. I’m not sure I can. I’m definitely not supposed to, but I’m starting to care less about these agency rules, and more about my charge. I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve internalized my mission to protect him, or because of something more, and that terrifies me.

“I broke into your apartment because the last time I saw you, you pointed a gun at me. I had to make sure you weren’t going to shoot me.”

He relaxes a little bit more. “But why were you breaking into my office?”

“I broke into your office because I was sent to steal something.”

His jaw tightens. “So you admit you were going to steal from me? How can I trust that you want to keep me safe?”
With no warning at all, he twists underneath me and pushes up from the ground, bucking me onto the floor.
Damn it
.

I scramble after him as he runs for his bedroom. I’m fast, but he has a head start. As I reach him he is digging around in his nightstand. I jump on him, putting him in a chokehold and locking his arms at his sides with my legs. He manages to stay on his feet, straightening up and pivoting back into a wall, crushing me.

I don’t let go. Instead, I tighten my hold around his neck. He leans forward, and then throws himself back against the wall again.

All the air is forced from my lungs. I cough, but hold on. He’s losing steam. He moves forward again for one more rush at the wall, but he staggers. I’ve cut off the flow of oxygen to his head, and he’s near passing out. He readies himself to slam into the wall again, and I release his arms
from my legs so that I can save myself the final blow. We fall back, and I catch him and lower him to the ground. He’s not fully out, but can no longer stand.

“But I invited you into my home,” he says. His voice is weak. I realize I’ve hurt him, and not just physically. “Lori, we had a connection. You wanted to make love. If you’d had a condom, we would have had sex that night. Is that what you do for your employer? Have sex with strangers and steal their secrets?”

How do I tell him that he’s wrong? He’s taken the facts, boiled them all down, and come to a conclusion that is absolutely wrong. My employer teaches me to read people, give them what they think they want so that they give me what I really want. If, during the course of events, I have great sex with a man as gorgeous as him, I see nothing wrong with that.

“I told you, it’s complicated,” I say. A soft rustling noise in the other room makes me freeze and cover his mouth with my hand. The only sound in the apartment comes from a ticking clock and quietly humming refrigerator.

“Mmmf,” he says, I take my hand off his mouth to let him finish. “
A moi!
” he shouts, the French cry for help. I cover his mouth again.

“Geoffrey, you need to stay quiet. I told you, I’m here to protect you. If you call attention to us, I will need to knock you out. Do you think you can keep quiet?”

He shakes his head. At least he’s honest.

The floorboard behind me creaks and I react a second too late. A whoosh is followed by what feels like a bee sting in my ass. Geoffrey takes advantage of my distraction and twists up from the floor, pulling my gun from its holster and firing.

My head clouds, the world blurs…and then goes dark.

“Lori. Please. Wake up. Please. I need your help.
S’il tu plait
.” Someone is cradling me in their lap as they gently slap my face.

“No,” I mumble. “Just let me sleep five more minutes.”

“Shit,” a sexy male French voice says. I force my eyes open and look into Geoffrey’s face.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“Lori? Oh, thank God you’re okay.” He kisses my forehead.

It’s still dark outside, and the air is chilly. I shiver and he wraps his other arm around me, pulling me close.

“Geoffrey? Where did they take us? Are you hurt?”

“No. I’m fine. They didn’t take us anywhere. I did,” he says.

As the rest of my senses come into focus, I can feel the cold, hard ground beneath us. We sit below the street on the walkway that goes along the river. He’s managed to find a place in the shadows underneath a bridge. The city is quieter now. The streetlights illuminate the closed shops. The Eiffel Tower shines dull and lifeless in the distance.

“We’re just down the street from my building. I’m sorry, it’s as far as I could run.”

I think back to the moments before I blacked out. I remember seeing a flash of the person who shot me with something. I rub my butt cheek, recalling the sting. It was the woman, the other agent. She had been sent to get me, or Geoffrey, but she’d used a dart gun, doping me rather than killing me. Why?

“What happened to her?” I ask.

“I shot her. I…I don’t know. Do you think I killed her?” Geoffrey’s voice trembles. His dark hair is disheveled and his eyes are bloodshot. He clings to me, shaking.

He’s not trained for this sort of thing. I’ve never shot anyone before, but at least I know one day I probably will. I know it’s coming, and I’m fully prepared for it. Geoffrey may own a gun, but he never intended to use it. I slide my hand up his neck to his face, cupping it. “You did what you had to do,” I say.

He nods, trying to convince himself I’m right. I push myself up, attempting to stand, but whatever drug that woman shot me with is still in my system. My head spins and I have to sit back down. I just need another minute to get the world to stop spinning, and then I can figure out what our next move is. We can’t hide under this bridge forever.

We need to get to a safe place. Unfortunately, the only safe houses I know of in Paris are connected to Sims and his bogus mission. I need to call Lincoln. He’ll be able to find us a hideout. But as soon as I turn on my phone, Sims will track my location, and if Lincoln doesn’t have a safe house ready for me, or worse, if Lincoln doesn’t answer his phone at all, I’ll need to find a place to wait.

“Do you have a car, Geoffrey?” I ask.

He nods. “It’s in the garage at Intelex.”

Crap
. “They’ll be watching for us there.”

“I have a motorcycle. But I keep it in my friend’s garage way out in the suburbs.”

“Perfect,” I say, as I pull my phone out of my bag. “Can you help me up? We need to get a taxi.”

I wait until we are safe in the cab before turning on my phone. It rings only once before Lincoln answers. “Jessica.”

“I have Geoffrey, but they’re already after him. We need a safe house, do you have one?”

“Dammit. This all happened too fast. I’m working on it, but I don’t have one yet. I need time.”

“We don’t really have time. The longer I have my phone on the easier we are to track. Please.”

“The only thing we know for sure is that he isn’t working alone, which means I don’t know who I can trust right now. I’ll see what I can pull together. Call me back at o-four-hundred.”

“Done.” I hang up the phone and check the time: two in the morning. When had it gotten so late?

Geoffrey’s friends live in Neuilly-sur-Seine, one of the wealthiest suburbs of Paris. The houses along their street are obscenely huge, and the lawns are sprawling by Paris standards. The street is quiet and their house is dark, but all the houses are, being that it’s two-thirty in the morning.

Rather than wake the residents, we let ourselves into their three-car garage. Geoffrey doesn’t have his key since we left in such a rush, but locks are not an issue for me. I let us in the side door and he keys in the code to disarm the alarm. We leave the lights off so as not to alert anyone to our presence and Geoffrey leads the way, sliding around a car inside. In the near pitch black, I can just make out the outlines of several racing motorcycles, nice ones.

Geoffrey fumbles toward me in the dark. “I’m sorry, Lori.” The way he says my cover name is so cute—it sounds like
Lowee
. I wonder if it would sound as cute if he said my real name. Maybe.

“I’m sorry too, Geoffrey. I didn’t know what I was being sent to do. I thought I was just taking some harmless program for…” My head must still be cloudy from whatever drugs they shot me with. I can’t have really thought it would be okay to tell him who I work for. I don’t know what’s come over me. “Well, I don’t know who it was now. But I didn’t think there was any real harm in what I was doing.”

“You mean when you threw yourself at me just so you could steal my access codes?” he asks. His voice is strained.

In the darkness I can’t see the look on his face, but I don’t have to. I know he feels betrayed most of all because of that one thing. Like the passion between us wasn’t real. But it was. Hell, it still is. I take a step toward him, putting my hands on his chest, and turn my face up to his. “I wasn’t faking it.” I slide my hands down and around his waist, pressing my body against his. “This feeling between us is real.” My insides burn with how true the words are.

“How do I know you aren’t lying again?” he asks, pulling away. He walks over to the car and leans against the hood. “How can I trust you after all that you’ve done?”

With these words, he hurts me more than anyone has in a long time. Because I don’t want him to be hurt. I don’t want to be the one making him feel pain. “You have every right to feel betrayed, Geoffrey. It’s true, I lied to you. But I was also lied to. I thought I was doing the right thing. And if, while doing the right thing, I got to spend a special night with someone as sweet as you? That seemed, well…”

I walk up to Geoffrey, stopping in front of him in the darkness and wait for him to say something, anything.

His hand reaches out to mine and he pulls me close. Wrapping his warm arms around me, he lifts me up to him and kisses me. I feel my eyes dampen as I kiss him back. I know he doesn’t want what I can offer:
a quick, intense romance and the almost guarantee that he’ll never see me again. In the short time I’ve known him, I can already tell he wants more than that. When he looks at me, his eyes are full of desire, but that’s not all. There’s something else there, too. He yearns for someone to care for. Someone he can fall in love with. I try to imagine what it would be like to be with him. To come home to him every night, to make love to him every night. That’s what he wants. That’s what he deserves, but that’s not me. I break away from the kiss.

“I can’t be what you want me to be,” I say.

“How do you even know what I want?” He pulls me back into his strong arms, and his lips are on mine again, taking control. Everywhere our bodies touch, my senses heighten. I feel a throb between my legs.

I have no will against this. I kiss him back, and when he reaches down with one hand and grabs my ass, my legs wrap around him, latching on. He sets me on the hood of the car and pushes himself against me. He’s already hard, and I moan at the feeling of his hardness in between my legs. “Now,” he says, his voice is deep. “Now you know what I want, don’t you?”

“God, I hope so,” I say, barely above a whisper.

As he rolls his hips against mine, the throbbing between my legs becomes so intense that a whimper escapes my lips, making him smirk. He grabs the bottom of my shirt and pulls it off in one quick motion. The cold air makes me shiver, and I gravitate back to his warm arms that encircle me as we kiss and nip at each other’s lips, generating more heat. His hands graze the sides of my breasts and my nipples ache for his touch, but his fingers only brush close enough for me to want more. I push closer and he continues to suck on my lower lip and trace the lace of my bra.

“Please,” I manage in between kisses. Finally, he cups my breasts and gives them one delicious squeeze that makes me stop everything as I melt into his hands.

“Take it off,” he grumbles against my lips.
Desire shoots through me and I obey, removing my bra and tossing it to the floor. He pushes me back against the hood of the car, and the chill in the night air makes my nipples harden. He leans over, taking one in his hot, wet mouth while pinching the other with his fingers, making me arch my back and press into him.

When he pulls away, it is only to relieve me of my pants, which he does with amazing speed, leaving me naked in front of him once again. “I have something special for you,” he says. As he reaches in his pocket, I already know what it is. After our last encounter, satisfying as it was, all I can think about is how big he is, and how much I want him inside me. He pulls out a package and rips it open. I squeal involuntarily as he unzips his pants and pulls out his cock, rolling on the condom.