Facing Fear (5 page)

She was trembling but she didn’t protest when he stepped away from the bathroom door, with her in his arms. Her eyes shone, even in the semidarkness, and he slowly slid her down the length of his body, feeling her knuckles running down his chest and stomach. She didn’t move away when he put her down, her face buried against his breastbone.

He had not held a trembling woman in his arms since forever. It made him ache inside, and he didn’t like it. It felt like a hairline crack was appearing where he bottled up all his emotions. He smoothed his hand down her long hair and steadied her with gentle arms. His eyes narrowed. No, she was more dangerous than Denise Lorens.

“Go put something on,” he said abruptly. “I don’t hurt injured birds, and you tremble like one.”

Nikki stiffened at his harsh words. For a few moments there, she had been lost in his heat, and his arms around her had made her feel…she took a few steps away from him. She was about to say “safe.” The man attacked her, and she felt safe?

How was that possible? She didn’t like people touching her, and this man had his arms wrapped around her. Her body had slid against his heat and wasn’t repelled at all. And he
hadn’t let her embarrass herself when he could have easily just let her fall, just to humiliate her.

He cocked a golden brow. Those green eyes glinted dangerously, as if he were about to change his mind. She blinked hard and swiftly made her escape into the bathroom.

Before the door closed, she heard him say, in that silky velvet voice that reminded her of an arrogant warrior who understood the sharpness of a new blade, “Don’t take too long, Nikki. I don’t like waiting.”

S
he wasn’t the soft one.
He
was. He had her where he wanted her, but instead had let her go. All because of a pair of pleading eyes and a mouth that he wanted to kiss.

Rick wiped his own with the back of his hand. Where the hell was his control? Nikki Taylor wasn’t what she seemed to be. If she was an I.I. operative, she certainly hadn’t been coached on how to react to men. As she said, she wasn’t Denise Lorens.

He understood women like Denise. Even after he pulled out her classified files and knew what she was up to, he hadn’t backed away from her advances. It was, after all, better to let them see what they wanted to see. And his Task Force Two job was so dishwater dull that he actually enjoyed the danger of the risks he was taking. Why not? A female operative couldn’t be trusted anyhow, and if she wanted to be used that way, he was only too happy to oblige. As long as he was in control of the situation, of course.

This Nikki Taylor with the fake history had gotten under his skin. Whoever had sent her was very good. He realized now that her casual distance from him was all deliberate, meant to elicit his attention. He should have just stayed away and waited for her to come to him. Instead he had allowed her looks to bring back feelings that he had closed off, and even with his suspicion of what she was, he couldn’t stop himself. He couldn’t wait.

He clenched one hand as he looked around her bedroom
with its cool white and green colors. The blankets on the bed were folded back, ready for its occupant. He walked toward it, taking in the books stacked by on the nightstand. He picked one up. And another. Fiction.

There was a notepad next to the books. He opened it. He was too used to reading private things to feel any twinge of guilt. What he could find out could help save his skin. His lips twisted derisively. Miss Taylor wasn’t as innocent as she appeared, anyhow. His name was written in there, circled several times. He didn’t think he was the hero of her story.

Nikki pulled on the only thing she had in the bathroom, besides what she had worn that day. The large cotton bathrobe covered every inch from her neck to her ankles. She couldn’t put those clothes back on.
Unclean
. She shook her head.

Her hair was a mess. Her eyes were too large. She hurriedly pulled back her hair, braiding it with absentminded ease as her mind raced over what had happened and how to face the man outside.

She had expected anger. Even attraction of some sort. Rick Harden, after all, was a sexual man. All reports pointed to his libido. She even understood that was his weapon. His aura of unavailability made him a challenge to women around him. She had watched him long enough to see it at work. An aloof man with a sexual reputation was hard to ignore.

But she hadn’t expected her own response. She tightened the sash around her waist. Five years out of the business had removed that protective layer between emotion and reaction. She had allowed fear to take over the situation, and then to make it worse, she had actually felt something else. She dared not form the word in her mind. That would be admitting something for which she wasn’t ready.

A deep calming breath. She put on some lipstick. She still felt naked somehow. Then, before she started to think too much, she turned around and opened the door.

Rick Harden looked good in black. It highlighted his golden coloring and added toughness to his athletic built—
tall and sleek, with powerful arms and, she recalled from experience, equally powerful quadriceps. She pushed away the memory of the feel of his thigh muscles tightening against her, as she emerged slowly from the dark into the lit bedroom.

Gone was the bureaucrat in conservative suit and tie. She had sensed that was just a façade, anyway. She had deliberately stayed away to observe, so she could catch the real Rick Harden. And here he was, in her bedroom, studying her, touching her things. The invaded had become the invader.

He was standing next to where she had hung her wind chime by the bed, and turned when he heard her approach. The significance wasn’t lost to her, that in order to understand this man, she would have to listen very, very closely, to hear his
chuung
. It would not be an easy task to know Ricardo Harden. His center was buried very deep.

She was drawn to those eyes. They looked greener somehow, reminding her of the nights in the dark when she had yearned for that color. They had glittered with suppressed emotion when he was holding her in his arms. She wanted to stare into those green depths and seek out all his secret pain.

“Why do you keep looking at me like that?” Rick interrupted her thoughts. She cocked her head, not sure what he meant. He snapped his fingers, and she blinked. “Like that. You look at me transfixed.”

She didn’t know that. She would have to think about it. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” she said out loud.

He turned back to her wind chime and flicked a finger against one of the hanging wands. It swayed inward, clinking the middle wand softly. The room echoed with the melodic notes. “So what do you see?” he asked, his eyes still on her chime. “With those writer’s eyes?”

A skilled operative always asked the right questions. Nikki never doubted Rick’s ability to get to the truth. He had refined this skill to perfection for years, just to protect himself from being cornered. She had never intended to hide everything from him, anyway. After all, she needed his full cooperation to complete her contract.

She was glad he stood across the room. The distance took
away some of the tension between them that was so palpable when he was close. With his finger, he stilled the swaying wands of the chime, stopping the musical clanging, but she could still feel the room humming with the vibrations.

He touched her things. She explored his secrets. He asked indirect questions. She looked for hidden answers. Balance.

“I see details no one else does,” she answered.

“And do you use these details in your books?”

“Some.”

Abruptly he moved away from her chime and gave her his fullest attention. The bed between them, folded back in invitation. Her chimes and the center of the universe. Nikki held her breath and hoped it was only she who saw these details and not the man who affected her so strangely. Sometimes she couldn’t decide if it was her wild imagination that brought up these things that seemed to fit together.

“You piece together these details,” Rick continued as he walked slowly around the bed, “and what was it you said you do? Oh yes, you suggest ‘corrections to what is out of balance.’ And this is all connected with your
stories
.”

He put the emphasis on the last word, a touch of mockery in his voice. Nikki could deal with that. Mockery was easily deflected, unlike her attraction to him.

“It is my job description,” she said gravely.

He stopped about five feet away, close enough for her to see the distrust in his eyes, and far enough for her to feel safe. “Tell me more,” he invited, in a deceptively soft voice. “After all, I seem to be a subject of interest in your research. What was it you said to Agent Jones, that you’re trying to figure out a man who is always running from his past? Tell me, what are the details you were trying to pick up on that jogging trail this morning? Or is that part of your balance act?”

She had poked at the embers to spark a flame, so she shouldn’t be afraid of getting burned now. “Mr. Harden,” she began, and his brows lifted slightly at the formality. “My method of research is considered controversial, at best, and
‘out there,’ at worst. Believe me, I can take any insults you’re going to hurl in my direction because I’ve heard them all before.”

“I haven’t started hurling anything yet. Why don’t you tell me exactly what you’re trying to research and who you’re after.” He smiled for the first time, a humorless curve of those uncompromising lips that brought a startling change to his face. He appeared younger, the lines bracketing his mouth relaxing his usual rigidly controlled facial expression. “Just in case I have it all wrong, of course, but a romance writer shouldn’t be so knowledgeable about TIARA and how it works.”

“If I tell you that you will know soon, would you leave it at that?”

Her query was followed by a pause. “It depends.” He took several steps toward her.

Nikki dug her hands into her bathrobe pockets, willing herself not to retreat. She knew now that he was testing her, seeing what made her tick. He was just as interested in digging deeper as she was. “On?” she asked instead, forced to throw back her head to look up at him.

“On why you’re doing this research.” His hand reached out and circled her long braid, but instead of pulling it, he slid the length through his closed palm. “Tell me, Nikki, what is it about me they want you to find out?”

Nikki watched as he started to loosen her hair from its barrette. She should say something to stop him but his expression fascinated her. There was a reverence in the way he handled each thick strand as he unwound the length of it.

He looked up, hands still busy. “Well?”

“They want to know whether you’re safe,” she breathed out as he reached the halfway point of her braid. His hands stopped, but only for a moment. He had loosened her hair with the quickness of someone who had done it often. An unskilled pair of hands would have tangled the long hair by now. He resumed this strangely new, yet familiar, action, as if they weren’t two strangers in the middle of a verbal altercation.

Her hair, a little damp still, came free, already wavy from being twisted. “Am I?” he asked. “Safe?”

He was a master manipulator. He knew the correct question was what he was supposed to be safe for, what they were afraid he would do. Instead he chose to make it personal, using her words against her. Just as they had suspected all along, he wasn’t that man who played by the rules, choosing his options with dull conservatism by focusing all his energy toward following regulation. It now seemed as if he didn’t care anymore whether they found out.

“No,” she whispered back as he fanned her hair between his fingers. “You’re not safe.”

“So what do you suggest to correct this?” Rick taunted. “And how would that help your romance writing? Or am I supposed to help you with that part of your research?”

So they had sent her to find out whether he was safe, had they? Rick wanted to laugh but he bitterly swallowed the urge. He had spent a decade being safe, and now because of Gorman’s betrayal, they wanted their dullest man declared a danger.

He looked at Nikki Taylor with her long hair and knowing eyes. Fine. He was tired of playing it their way, anyhow. He would go along with this and in the process expose them for what they were. She was a tool for them, and he would use her as his.

Why not? He reached out, unable to resist touching her long braid. It was thick and soft, and he knew when it was dry and hanging loose, it would blanket her entire body. She hadn’t moved or objected when he pulled the barrette off.

For some masochistic reason, he wanted to torture himself. They had sent Nikki Taylor as temptation, and he wasn’t even fighting it. Everything about her was a lure, and he went for the thing that had caught his attention, time and time again. He wanted to see her hair unsecured. He wanted to feel the heavy curtain spilling over his shoulders as he made love to her against that bathroom wall. He wanted to find out if it would slide over his naked back, like cool Chinese silk,
as he slowly brought her to a climax on that green and white bed behind him.

Would she be trained to please him? He looked up from the undone hair in his hands into her raised face and caught that expression in her eyes that kept bothering him. Her fear of him was very real. He had tested it. When he stood across the room, she was able to fence with him. He had moved within five feet of her, and even though she stood her ground and challenged him, her eyes were wary. When he finally came close enough to touch her, her hands had disappeared into her pockets, as if she was trying not to show her nervousness.

She was right. He wasn’t safe. Not to her. Or to himself.

“When can we start?”

Her question jerked him out of his revelry. His eyes narrowed as he tried to determine her frame of mind. Nikki Taylor didn’t strike him as a flirt, but of course, that could be part of her act. Her dark brown eyes looked back at him steadily although her hands were still buried in her pockets. It intrigued him, this combination of fear and courage. She might have the strength to take him on after all.

“As soon as I set the rules,” he said, waiting for her to bristle at his words.

He should have known better by now. The woman didn’t even glare or challenge him. “Of course,” she agreed, as if that seemed fair, not knowing that she had handed him the keys to take her where he wanted her.

Rick frowned. Too easy. “And how will you benefit?”

“I need you to answer my questions in an interview format,” she said simply. “You will also help my research because you can give me access. Don’t worry, I’m not asking you to do anything illegal. My first request is to be inserted into the recruitment classes.”

He cocked his head. “And that will help you to decide whether I’m safe?” He made a mental note to look for personnel inspection reviews. Maybe Internal Investigations had more than him in mind.

“My interview and research start from the general to
specifics. The peripheral stuff is usually the weakest and the most dangerous. It tells a lot about the center and the one in charge.”

“I’m not in charge of recruitment,” Rick said. “I.I. hasn’t been filling you in very well.”

“I told you, the way I do things is different. With your help, I can finish my assignment a lot faster.”

She was sounding more confident now, more like the kind of operative I.I. sent out. Rick felt disappointed. And angry. He didn’t understand the clashing emotions, but then he didn’t understand what was driving him on with this game either. It was suicide, and he knew it. She was going to troll for information for her handlers, and he was going to help her.

Out to hang him, as he had started the day thinking. He had thought they were going to hang him but it was clear now that was way too suspicious. No, he wasn’t going to be given the opportunity to be seen as a sacrificial lamb. Instead they were going to let him hang himself.