Cooper Security 06 - Secret Intentions (16 page)

He brushed his fingertips against her lips, silencing her midsentence. “I’m trained to defend myself and others.”

Her lips trembled beneath his fingers, and the fire blazing in the depths of her blue eyes had nothing to do with fear. Jesse felt an answering lick of flame, low in his gut. A stream of images flooded his imagination—Evie’s soft, curvy body, naked and hot, twined with his until he couldn’t tell where he stopped and she began. Her hands, small and talented, moving with skill and imagination over his body. Her soft mouth, open and wet beneath his, her tongue dancing sinuously against his.

Wanting Evie was still…strange. Not because she wasn’t beautiful or desirable—any man with eyes in his head and a working libido could have figured that out at first glance. But he’d seen her as Rita’s little sister for so long that he had thought himself immune to her charms.

Clearly, as the kiss last night and the even more sexually intense kiss this afternoon had proved, he wasn’t immune at all.

Evie stepped away from him suddenly, breaking the contact between them. “I guess I should at least try to get some sleep.” Her gaze locked with his for a brief, electric moment, then she headed for the bedroom.

He watched her leave, his chest aching. The urge to stop her, to catch her and pull her back to him, stunned him with its intensity.

Just how out of control was he becoming where Evie was concerned?

* * *

E
VIE WAS DROWNING
. She couldn’t see the water in the blackness surrounding her, but she could feel it, pouring into her mouth and ears, filling her lungs, smothering her. She struggled against the relentless tide, looking for an escape, a point of light, something to tell her there was hope in the middle of this terrifying black void.

A hand caught her arm, and she whipped around, torn between fear of the unknown and relief that she was no longer alone. The relief fled, the fear magnified as she found herself staring at Alan Wilson, the security guard her father had assigned to take her to her sister’s wedding reception. He stared back at her, blood streaming from the bullet hole in his forehead.

She tried to pull away from his tight grip, but something behind her blocked her retreat. She twisted frantically, finally pulling free from Wilson’s grasp, only to find herself tangled up in the shattered limbs of the SSU agent who’d tried to chase her across Martin Luther King Boulevard.

“Jesse!” she tried to scream, but only gurgles emerged from her throat. Her head swam, her heart pounding so hard and fast that she feared it would burst out of her chest.

“I’m here.” Jesse’s voice seemed to come from miles away, barely audible. She turned around and around, desperate to find where the voice was coming from.

“Jesse?” Her throat was no longer filled with water but with sand. It rasped over her vocal cords as she tried to speak, filled her mouth with the dry heat of the desert.

“Right here, Evie. Open your eyes.” Jesse’s voice was louder now, close by. He’d told her to open her eyes, but she hadn’t realized they were closed. Blinking them open, she expected to see a bright, relentless desert sun, burning down on her with its desiccated heat.

Instead, she opened her eyes to cool darkness relieved by pale streaks of blue moonlight filtering through a nearby window. She was on a pillowy mattress, swaddled in soft sheets and a fluffy comforter.

And Jesse was there, in the dark, a comforting shadow sitting on the edge of her bed.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured, her voice raspy with sleep. Her mouth was dry, her throat aching for something to drink. “I woke you.”

He touched her hand, his fingers warm on her skin. “I wasn’t asleep yet. It’s only eleven. You were having a bad dream.”

She tried to remember what she’d been dreaming about. She could recall only a few strange snippets—the sensation of drowning, the escalating terror of feeling trapped and unable to move away from the danger. A flash of blood on a man’s face, of twisted limbs and bleeding grins—

She drove those images away, squelching a shudder. “I don’t remember what it was about.”

“Well, why don’t you try to get back to sleep, then? Maybe this time you’ll have sweet dreams.”

“I need to get something to drink first.”

“Stay here. I’ll get it for you.” He was up off the bed and out the door before she could protest. With a sigh, she pulled herself into a sitting position and turned on the lamp on the bedside table, driving the darkness to the corners of the room.

Jesse came back with a glass of ice water and a small plastic pitcher. He set them both on the bedside table. “If you get thirsty in the night, you won’t have to get up and wake yourself up.”

She smiled, touched by his thoughtfulness. He was really making it hard to put her schoolgirl fantasies about him behind her. “Thank you.”

“No problem.”

As he started to get up, she caught his hand. “Shouldn’t you be in bed? We could both use some sleep.”

He looked down at her, his eyes coffee-dark. “I was doing a little more research into Katrina Hilliard’s background.”

“Oh?” She let go of his hand and patted the edge of the bed next to her.

He accepted her invitation to sit. “I decided to do a search for her name and Jackson Melville’s together. And it turns out the Singer Foundation Board wasn’t their only connection. They both were at Princeton the same years, and I found an interview with Hilliard from ten years ago, before MacLear’s fall, where Hilliard was praising Melville for MacLear’s expansion into environmental recovery as part of the services they offered.”

She arched an eyebrow. “MacLear offered environmental-recovery services?”

“It was news to me, too. I called Rick to ask him about it. Apparently they offered manpower for things like oil-spill cleanups and other environmental disasters. But Rick thinks it might have been a cover for getting the SSU into some sensitive areas.”

“I would have figured Hilliard as someone deeply suspicious of mercenary outfits like MacLear. Based on her other known viewpoints.”

“A lot of ideological people look the other way when it comes to supporting their own pet projects.”

“You mean she would have turned a blind eye to what the SSU was doing as long as their actions supported her goals?”

“You don’t get to a position like chief of staff to the president without making a few compromises along the way,” Jesse said.

“Murder is a pretty big compromise.”

“The ends justify the means for some people.”

Evie shivered. “I can’t imagine thinking like that.”

“I know you can’t. I saw how you reacted to what happened to those men today.” Jesse brushed a piece of her hair away from her eyes.

Heat flooded the narrow space between them, and Evie’s body responded with a flush of intense sexual awareness. His fingers brushing against the skin of her forehead felt like a caress. His dark eyes locked with hers, desire burning in their depths.

He wanted her. She wanted him. What to do next seemed so simple and effortless.

Only it wasn’t. It might be effortless, but it could never be simple. Not when she was Rita’s sister and he was the man who’d broken her sister’s heart, even if, ultimately, the breakup had been no one’s fault.

He cleared his throat and stood up, snapping the exquisite tension between them. She leaned back against the headboard, feeling boneless.

“I made that call to Darcy, but he was a step ahead of us. He’d already been looking into the story about Morris Gamble’s affair and came up with Katrina Hilliard as the top prospect for the role of the other woman.”

“Really? How?”

“That’s the interesting part. He said his sources mentioned seeing Gamble meeting Hilliard around lunchtime outside a house in Congress Heights every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday for weeks. He checked the address—it belongs to Hilliard’s aunt, the one who works at St. Elizabeth’s.”

“Every Wednesday through Friday?”

He nodded.

“So what do we do next? Go stake out that neighborhood and try to catch them in the act?” She couldn’t help but sound doubtful. They’d already dodged bullets doing something a lot less dangerous than that.

“Actually, I don’t think there’s much else to find here in D.C.,” he said.

His statement caught her by surprise. “I thought you said the answers to our questions were here.”

“And they were. But they didn’t really solve our bigger problem, did they? The SSU is still coming after you.”

“Then what good did it do to come here?” She felt queasy at the thought that all they’d gone through over the past few days had been without a purpose. Two men had died because they’d come here. They might have been very bad guys, but had they deserved to die such horrible, bloody deaths? “Did we do it all for nothing?”

He leaned against the doorframe, his gaze thoughtful. “It wasn’t for nothing. We have a pretty good idea that at least two of the president’s most trusted advisers have thrown in with the Espera Group’s goals. And it’s good that we know about Katrina Hilliard’s links to Jackson Melville, even if we can’t prove she’s behind what the SSU has been doing.”

“If we can’t prove it, we can’t stop her.”

“We’re not through trying to prove it.” His voice was resolute. “It’s just time we take a different tack.”

“Like what?”

“There’s a reason the bad guys have been going to such lengths to find General Ross’s journal. Clearly they believe the journal contains the kind of evidence we’re looking for.”

Evie’s gut tightened as a terrible thought occurred to her. “Do you think that’s why Mrs. Ross was attacked? They were looking for the journal at her house?”

Jesse’s mouth tightened with anger. “Shannon said they tore up her house pretty badly. They were looking for
something.
It could have been the journal, I suppose.”

“But you haven’t exactly been shy about letting people know the journal’s in Cooper Security’s possession,” she pointed out. “Why would they be looking for it at Mrs. Ross’s house?”

“Maybe they’re looking for the code instead. Finding the journal doesn’t help at all if you don’t have all three portions of the code. They’ve been trying to go after you as a way to force your father to reveal his part of the code, and they kidnapped the whole Harlowe family for three weeks in hope of getting the general to give them his code key. They’re going after everything as ruthlessly as they can.”

And they could be very ruthless, Evie thought, remembering Alan Wilson’s blood staining the upholstery of his SUV. She couldn’t hold back a little shudder. “So what do we do now, if we’ve accomplished all we can here in D.C.?”

He pushed away from the doorframe, squaring his shoulders and meeting her questioning gaze with firm resolve.

“It’s time to go home,” he said.

Chapter Thirteen

Jesse and Evie drove across the state line between Virginia and Tennessee a little before five Thursday afternoon, after a late start that morning leaving Annie Harlowe’s apartment in Arlington. Evie had wanted to make sure they gave the place a good cleaning before they left.

“I can arrange for someone to come clean after we leave,” Jesse had told her, amused by her nervous energy as she washed dishes, wiped down counters and scrubbed the tub.

“I want to do it myself. I know Annie personally, and if she ever gets a chance to get out of that safe house and back here to D.C., I want to be able to say I left her place in better condition than I found it.”

He’d caught her hands as she started to pull out a mop for the kitchen floor. “Evie, you’re just delaying the inevitable. We have to go back home today. It’s where the journal is.”

She’d put the mop back in the closet and pressed her cheek against his shoulder, melting into his embrace when he’d put his arms around her and pulled her close. “Have you heard anything new on Mrs. Ross’s condition?”

“I talked to Shannon early this morning before you woke up,” he’d told her, trying to keep his caress comforting instead of seductive. “No change so far, but the doctors tell her that it’s actually a good sign that her condition hasn’t deteriorated. Her chances of recovery improve every hour she doesn’t get any worse.”

He’d checked with Shannon again when they’d stopped outside Roanoke for lunch, and learned, to his relief, that Lydia Ross was starting to wake up. “The doctors can’t promise she won’t have some memory issues,” Shannon had cautioned, but she hadn’t been able to keep the excitement out of her voice. During the week she’d spent on Nightshade Island with Lydia Ross and her right-hand man, Gideon Stone, Shannon had become fast friends with the general’s widow. And she’d fallen head over heels in love with Stone, a former Marine who had made protecting Lydia Ross, whose son had died saving Gideon’s life, his personal mission.

Shannon and Lydia had stayed in touch after Lydia left the island and moved to Burkettville, a small farming town just north of Gossamer Ridge. She and Shannon visited back and forth often, because the drive between the two towns took only ten minutes.

The attack on Lydia had hit Shannon and Gideon hard, Jesse knew, well beyond her connection to the mystery Cooper Security was trying to solve. He was rather fond of the woman himself, admiring her combination of guts and grace. If he’d stayed in the Marine Corps, he’d have been smart to find such a woman as his wife.

His gaze wandered over to Evie, who was driving this leg of the trip. In a lot of ways, she reminded him of Lydia Ross, far more than Rita ever had. Rita was smart and resourceful, brilliantly beautiful and utterly charming. But she lacked her younger sister’s dogged determination, her scrappy confidence and her strength in the face of fear.

Evie’s charms were buried a little deeper than her sister’s. But now that he had begun to understand just what kind of woman she really was, behind the occasional prickly self-protection, he found himself thinking that she was the superior sister.

Unnerved by that realization, he dragged his thoughts back to more immediate concerns. “Pull off at the next exit,” he said.

She glanced his way. “What are we going to do?”

“Load our guns. We’re in reciprocity territory now.” Unlike Virginia, Tennessee would honor their concealed carry permits. And he’d already spent too long feeling naked and unprotected. He wasn’t the sort of man who shot first and asked questions later, but he had run into enough trouble over the years to know that he was safer armed than not.