Overnight Male (18 page)

When Nick said nothing, she glanced up again to see him smiling at her in a way that indicated he really was genuinely sorry. “Truly,” he told her. “Present company completely excluded.”

She nodded, feeling a little better. Okay, feeling a lot better. But she said nothing more, so Nick turned his attention back to the guys. “And what did you say her name was again?”

The guys all exchanged glances. “I don’t think we did, did we?”

Nick’s eyes narrowed with his impatience. “What was her name?” Although he didn’t say it aloud, Iris could still hear the “you little assholes” with which she was sure he’d wanted to conclude the question.

“Jenny something,” Hobie said.

“Sturgis,” Chuck immediately added. “Jenny Sturgis.”

Iris, too, sat up straighter at hearing it. “She works with me,” she said. “At Java Jackie’s.”

Nick turned back to her again, his eyes alive now with the sort of fire she’d been hoping to see in them when he looked at her. Only this time, the fire was for the smokin’-hot babe Jenny Sturgis, and not for Iris. “How long has she worked there?” he asked.

“She just started yesterday,” Iris told him.

Nick smiled at that, but it wasn’t the sort of smile she would have expected him to have for a smokin’-hot babe he was interested in sexually. It was more the kind of smile he would have for someone whose neck he wanted to wring. “What else can you tell me about her?” he asked.

Iris drew up her shoulders in what would have been a shrug if she’d released them, but she was too nervous to relax even that much. “Nothing. It was pretty busy yesterday. We didn’t have a lot of time to talk.”

“And when you did, what did you talk about?”

Iris swallowed with some difficulty. “Um, you,” she confessed.

Nick closed his eyes for a moment and shook his head slowly. “Oh, Iris,” he said softly. “You didn’t tell her where I was staying, did you?”

She shook her head vigorously. “No. No way. I only told her…” She swallowed hard again. She wasn’t about to tell Nick she’d been talking about him as her potential guy. “We were just talking about guys we knew,” she hedged. “And I mentioned you. I mentioned all of you,” she lied, turning to look at the others. “It was just, you know, girl talk. Nothing major.”

He looked as if he wanted to ask her more, but turned back to the guys instead. “And the rest of you?” he asked. “What do you know about this Jenny Sturgis?”

Hobie and Donny looked at Chuck. Chuck looked at Nick. “Not much,” he replied. “Like they said, she came into the library when I was working and needed some help finding some stuff on the Net. So I gave her a hand. We started talking. I could tell she was digging me, so I invited her to the party.”

“And you didn’t think that was odd?” Nick asked.

“That she was digging him?” Hobie asked, stifling another giggle. “Hell, yes, it was odd.”

Nick didn’t even acknowledge the other man’s remark. What Iris found interesting was that Chuck didn’t, either.

To Chuck, Nick clarified, “You didn’t find it odd that a student at a tech school like Waverly needed help finding something on the Internet? Just what kind of SAT scores did she have?”

Chuck said nothing. But his expression had elevated from angry and embarrassed to enraged and malevolent.

Hobie obviously didn’t notice, because he laughed and said, “Chuck was too busy searching her to notice anything else.”

Donny, just as clueless as his friend to Chuck’s state, added, “Yeah, he was too busy checkin’ out
her
Net.”

“And browsing her Web,” Hobie continued.

“Fingerin’ her mouse,” Donny said with a chuckle.

“Defragging her.”

“Takin’ a byte outta her Apple.”

“Naw, man. Outta her ASCII.” Though Hobie gave the abbreviation its phonetic pronunciation of ass-key, naturally.

“Workin’ on his RAM,” Donny continued, thrusting his fist forward—evidently having forgotten how much smaller Chuck’s member was. He should have thrust his pinkie forward instead.

“Looking for a place to shoot his upload,” Hobie added.

“Yeah, too bad about his tiny hard drive,” Donny concluded, generating new bursts of laughter all around.

“She was digging me,” Chuck replied adamantly, ignoring the other two. Which, Iris thought, should have told them how far his fury had ratcheted. “We hit it off. I didn’t think about why she’d need help.”

“And now that you do think about it?” Nick asked.

A look came into Chuck’s eyes then that was nothing short of murderous. And again Iris had to battle a twinge of fear at seeing it. “Now that I do,” he said, “it seems kind of strange.”

“Like maybe she
did
come into the library looking for something—or maybe you—specifically?”

“Maybe,” Chuck said.

Nick smiled, and there was something in his expression, too, that gave Iris pause, something that made her wonder if maybe he wasn’t exactly who—or what—she’d first thought him to be.

Very softly, very evenly he said, “So now, Chuck, the question is, what are you going to do about it?”

T
HIRTY MINUTES LATER
,
Hobie and Donny had taken off, leaving Adrian relieved to be rid of them and alone with Chuck and Iris to ponder the puzzle of the mysterious Jenny Sturgis.

Well, Adrian and Chuck were pondering that. Iris, Adrian saw, had seated herself in front of the television, joystick in hand—or whatever the hell joysticks were called these days, since Adrian was too unhip by their standards to know—playing a game. One he’d watched the boys play on a number of occasions. It seemed to involve an excessive amount of car chases and crashes, except that the goal of the game seemed to be
causing
the crashes, not avoiding them. The player was rewarded for every act of destruction, then given bonus points for additional, even more heinous acts. Running down a traffic cop, say. Or careening into the window of a day-care center. Or hurtling through the local humane society, sending puppies and kittens flying. Points were deducted, on the other hand, for things like buckling up or using a turn signal or maintaining a safe speed.

And they said today’s youth culture was too immersed in violence, Adrian thought as he watched Iris play. Well, gosh.

To his surprise, however, although Iris did indeed bring on the dangerously high speeds as she drove through the city, she slowed down when she passed the day-care center and humane society, and she carefully skirted the traffic cop. She just kept speeding through the urban landscape until she passed the city limits, then she headed into a more bucolic countryside where she drove some more. Slower now. Farther and farther away from any potential big point targets like scouts helping old ladies across the street and homeless people living in boxes. There was no potential for chases now. Nothing to crash into. No explosions of animal shelters. No fiery deaths of preschoolers. Just slow driving through the country. Though she stopped to allow a long line of baby ducks to cross the highway.

Of course, Adrian already knew Iris was burdened by a conscience. He knew she had an aversion to violence. And he knew she was second-guessing all the mayhem the group had been wreaking on the Net. In spite of her shortcomings, he very much enjoyed having her around. Because he was beginning to think maybe those things weren’t such shortcomings, after all. Iris was one of the rarest creations on earth, so rare, in fact, that Adrian had begun to think hers was an extinct species—a decent human being. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d encountered anyone up close who always tried to Do the Right Thing.
On purpose.
Even when that someone was just playing a video game.

Oh, wait. Yes, Adrian could remember the last time he’d encountered someone like that up close. And she might very well be getting close to him again. Because he had reason to believe that this Jenny Sturgis, the smokin’-hot babe who’d come out of nowhere on the Waverly campus, and who wore brown contact lenses, and who had dispatched three large men, leaving one in a half-naked heap on the floor, was a woman he knew rather well. Or, at least, had known her that way once.

Lila Moreau. Agent for his former employer, OPUS. Reputedly the most dangerous woman in the world.

Adrian believed it. Though not necessarily because of her actions or behavior. But because of what she could make men like him do and the ways she could make men like him behave.

One night. That was all he’d had with her. But it had been completely unforgettable. So unforgettable that he’d trotted out the memory on a fairly regular basis in the years since it had happened. And that was saying something for a man who generally considered women to be—

Well. For a man who didn’t consider women at all.

He glanced at Iris then. Most women, anyway.

But Lila Moreau was the sort of woman who wouldn’t allow herself to be forgotten. She had proved to be not so much Adrian’s nemesis as his rival. They were well matched, the two of them. In many ways they were two of a kind. Once he’d realized she worked for OPUS—not long after that unforgettable night—he’d found out everything he could about her. And he’d been surprisingly unsurprised to discover that the backgrounds and upbringings of them both bore many parallels. Yet she’d chosen the path of Doing the
Right
Thing, while he’d chosen the path of Taking
Every
thing. With a side trip down The Rest of the World Be Damned Way.

Strangely, however, as thoroughly interwoven as their paths had been since meeting, Adrian hadn’t seen Lila in person for years. He’d
thought
he was seeing her last month in Cleveland, of all places, but the woman he had been so certain was Lila was actually her twin sister, Marnie Lundy—a woman none of them had even known existed until about a month ago. Well, OPUS had known. They just hadn’t seen any reason to tell anyone about Marnie’s existence—not even the twin sister from whom she’d been separated as an infant. Even Adrian’s contact within the organization hadn’t had any prior knowledge that there was another Lila Moreau in the world—or, at least, someone who resembled her. Enough that OPUS tried to use Marnie as bait to lure Adrian out of hiding by having her pretend to be her sister.

Thankfully, his contact was able to relay the plan to him before he had indeed been reeled in, and he’d been able to slip away before they caught him. Unfortunately, it had also been before he’d had a chance to recover a document he very much wished he’d been able to recover: an encoded “novel” written by a retired OPUS archivist who went by the code name of Philosopher. Ironic, since the man’s brain was less a think tank of ponderous consideration and more a fun house of frivolous delusion. Too many years in service to OPUS could do that to a person, Adrian supposed.

Philosopher hadn’t been so deluded, however, that he hadn’t been able to piece together a good bit of Adrian’s comings and goings over the years. In fact, in his retirement he’d made Adrian’s comings and goings his hobby, and he’d identified behavior patterns and penchants Adrian himself hadn’t even realized he had. Enough that Philosopher’s “novel” had helped OPUS enormously in their hunt for him.

As evidenced by the fact that Lila Moreau was now close enough that she had made personal contact with every member of the group Adrian had surrounded himself with. Knowing Lila as well as he did—or, at least, knowing her reputation as well as he did, since he didn’t think anyone could really
know
Lila Moreau in anything other than the Biblical sense—she could be knocking on the door to his suite any moment.

“Do you know where she lives?” Adrian asked Chuck now.

Chuck shook his head. “I only saw her that day in the library and that night at the party.”

“Any chance you’ll see her again?”

“Doubtful, after what happened last time.”

“The attempted rape by you and your friends, you mean?” Adrian couldn’t help injecting. Nor could he help the contempt that colored the question. Actually, he probably could have helped that if he’d wanted to. He just didn’t want to.

Chuck sat up. “It wasn’t rape. She was up for it.”

Adrian bit his lip to keep himself from saying the obvious. Then he wondered why he was sparing a despicable abomination like Chuck and replied, “Pity you weren’t up for it, too.”

“It wasn’t rape,” Chuck insisted again.

“Only because you were prevented from going through with it,” Adrian pointed out. “What the hell were you thinking?”

Chuck squirmed enough that Adrian knew he understood perfectly what had almost happened at the party. What he had almost done. “I was drinking,” Chuck said. “We all were. Jenny was, too.”

“As if that excuses it,” Adrian sneered.

“Hey, what the hell do you care?” Chuck demanded, going on the offensive. “Since when did you become the almighty defender of truth and justice? You’re not exactly Mr. Sensitive when it comes to women.”

Good point, Adrian thought. Just why
did
he care that a bunch of drunken thugs had assaulted Lila? Had assaulted anyone? He should have been bothered by Chuck’s actions because they had threatened to draw attention to him, and therefore to the work they were doing—and to Adrian himself. Instead, he was bothered because Chuck’s actions were repugnant and had endangered someone. Someone who, ironically, was trying to keep Adrian from carrying out a plan he’d put in motion years ago, and about whose welfare he should be in no way concerned.

Just what the hell was the matter with him these days?

He glanced over at Iris again, who had stopped playing the video game and was now gazing back over her shoulder at Adrian, as if she, too, were interested in his response to Chuck’s statement.

Still looking at Iris, Adrian said, “There are some women in the world, Chuck, who are stronger than we men. In trying to overcome or control them, we simply illustrate how very weak we are. You need to learn to respect women like that. You need to respect all women. Because you never know when one like that will show up in your life. And you never know her effect on you until it’s too late.” He looked back at Chuck. “Not to mention you behaved like a pig.”