Authors: Elizabeth Bevarly
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #General, #Suspense
Overnight Male (3 page)
Oh, who was he kidding? He went out of his way to look as smug as possible.
He told her, “It’s a city known for showbiz mayors, tasteless pornography and dubious art exhibits.”
“Oh, great,” Lila groaned, looking down at the map again. “I have to go back to Vegas?”
He shook his head. “Not Las Vegas. Cincinnati.”
“Cincinnati?” she echoed incredulously, sitting back on her heels. “Just how much have you had to drink tonight, guy? Cincinnati is the heartland of America. It’s
Ohio,
for God’s sake. Have you ever been to Ohio? Me, I just left Ohio a couple of weeks ago. Walt Disney would gag on its sweetness. How does all that stuff relate to Cincinnati?”
Joel lifted a hand and counted them off. “Jerry Springer,” he said in response to item number one, extending his index finger. “Larry Flynt,” he added, thrusting up another—rather significant, at that—finger. “And the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit,” he concluded, adding a third finger to the mix. “Trust me. Cincinnati has a dark side you can’t begin to imagine.”
She burst out laughing at that. “Dark side. Cincinnati. Right.”
“Yeah, okay, maybe that’s pushing it,” he conceded, dropping both hands to his hips. “It’s still the place where we’re going to find Sorcerer. Mark my words.”
“How do you figure?”
“Like I said, he was in contact with several people when he was reeling in Avery Nesbitt. An inordinate number of them were located in the Cincinnati area. Also located in the Cincinnati area is a very small, very exclusive private college. Waverly College. Ever heard of it?”
“Yeah, it’s like a small-scale MIT.”
Joel nodded. “Except a degree from Waverly is more prestigious, and it’s a harder school to get into. What you end up with is a streamlined student body full of big brains that are light-years ahead of the intellectual norm, all of them tech majors, the vast majority in the field of computers. The place is thick with hackers. In fact, a few years ago, a small group of underclassmen was arrested, tried and convicted on charges of treason after hacking into top secret CIA files and selling them to terrorists to pay for their pornography and gaming habits.”
“I remember that,” she said with a nod that nudged a stray lock of pale blond hair over one eye. She immediately shoved it back behind one ear, but not before Joel’s fingers curved instinctively in preparation to do that himself.
Terrific, he thought. Barely an hour after meeting Lila, he was responding to her in a way that he really couldn’t afford to be responding. Wanting to touch her, however innocently. Hell, wanting to touch her in ways that weren’t innocent at all. Being mesmerized by the incredible blue eyes to the point of momentarily forgetting what he’d intended to say. Battling a very uncharacteristic—never mind completely politically incorrect—wave of arousal every time he looked up and saw her handcuffed to his bed. It had been months, maybe years, since he’d experienced such an immediate attraction to a woman. And Lila was the last woman he should be experiencing it for.
She added, “So you think Sorcerer stopped by Waverly on the way home from work to pick up a dozen eggheads with his usual gallon of milk?”
He nodded. “I think it’s extremely possible. And very likely.”
She thought about that for a minute. “Makes sense. Especially when you consider his recent appearance in Cleveland. It’s only a few hours’ drive from Cincinnati.”
“Also interesting, and significant,” Joel continued, “is the fact that there have been a rash of online scams and crimes committed in recent months that have been traced back to a user or users in this part of the country.” He pointed at the map again. “They started off as petty mischief, like worms and viruses and hoaxes, exactly the sort of thing college students enjoy most. But whoever’s been creating them and sending them out has covered his or her—or their—tracks well. We’ve only been able to pinpoint the city, not an actual address. Over the past several weeks, however, the crimes have escalated into some pretty major—and pretty ballsy—thefts and cons that are starting to rake in some significant money.”
“You don’t know who’s perpetrating them?” Lila asked.
He shook his head again. “Only that it’s someone in the Cincinnati area. Most likely someone at Waverly. But the activity shows signs of having started off with amateurs, becoming more sophisticated just recently.”
“Like maybe someone or a handful of people who were once only in it for the fun are now also in it for the profit.”
“Exactly like that.”
“Like maybe someone suddenly joined up with this person or persons and injected them with a little more ambition and organization.”
“Yep.”
“Like maybe Sorcerer has indeed found his band of merry hackers.”
“Which means he’s now stronger and smarter than he’s ever been before,” Joel concluded.
He traced his finger on the map in a circular motion around an area near the Ohio River. “Dormitory housing is pretty sparse at Waverly, so a good number of the students live in the city proper. And there’s an area downtown around Vine Street that especially caters to students. Lots of student-type apartments, coffee shops, clubs, student-friendly retail establishments, that kind of thing. I think that’s probably the best place to start looking. There and on Waverly’s campus. If my calculations are correct—and it goes without saying that they are,” he added, since Lila was right about modesty being overrated when it wasn’t warranted, “you’ll find Sorcerer in one place or another. Along with his accomplices. It’s just a matter of being in the right place at the right time.”
“And being uncharacteristically lucky,” she added.
He smiled. “So all that good karma you’ve been scoring over the years will come in handy now.”
She laughed at that, a deep, full-bodied, throaty laugh that made something inside Joel shimmy like mirage heat on a strip of desert highway. Only, instead of being way off in the distance like mirage heat usually was, it surrounded him and closed down hard. Once again he reminded himself that he was in no position to be feeling such things. Even under the best of circumstances, he did not need a sexual attraction to a woman whose emotions—at least the positive ones—ran about as deep as a fingerprint.
Note to self, Faraday: You’re not into meaningless sex anymore. Remember?
Well, evidently not…
“Do you have a list of the people in the area Sorcerer contacted and may or may not have followed up on?” Lila asked.
Joel shook off his wayward thoughts—again—and focused on the matter at hand. Which happened to be the woman he was trying not to think about. Damn. “We do,” he said. “It will be in a dossier with other information I have for you. But remember, there are almost certainly others we
don’t
know about.”
“Do you know if Sorcerer established any contact with any of the people you did identify?”
“You’ll receive a detailed account, but yes, we intercepted a number of e-mails between him and several students at Waverly. They were mostly exchanges of inconsequential information, though. Getting-to-know-you type stuff, the same thing he initially sent to Avery Nesbitt. Sorcerer assumed several different identities, each tailored to be most attractive to whomever he was in touch with. Most often, he was a young student at another university close enough to arrange for a physical meeting, should it come to that. With women, he invariably went the romantic route. With the men, he posed as another gamer and attempted to strike up a friendship through those avenues. Online gaming is huge at places like Waverly.”
“And did any such physical meetings take place?” Lila asked.
“A couple of times either Sorcerer or his mark would extend an invitation to meet up somewhere, but to the best of our knowledge, no such physical meetings ever took place.”
“To the best of your knowledge,” she repeated. “That means it’s entirely possible that he
has
made physical contact. With any number of those people.”
She was right, as much as Joel hated to admit it. Intelligence and surveillance could go only so far. And Sorcerer certainly knew how to keep himself from being tailed. He’d built a career on it. Not to mention, according to Sorcerer’s past habits—which, lately, Joel had been building his own career on—Sorcerer would delight in putting one over on OPUS by completing such a meeting just for the hell of it. He’d be careful, as he’d been in New York when he lured Avery Nesbitt into such a meeting, but he’d carry through. Unfortunately, Joel had an even bigger reason to agree with Lila.
“It’s more than possible,” he admitted. “It’s probable. Except for those few appearances in Cleveland, Sorcerer’s been off our radar for a while now. That’s given him ample opportunity to operate with total freedom. And there were plenty of gaps in our surveillance even when we
did
have him in our sights. Not that he can be sure he
hasn’t
been under constant surveillance, so there’s still some small chance he’s gone into hiding and stayed there, but—”
“Oh, he’s been sure he wasn’t under surveillance,” Lila told him with what sounded like absolute certainty. “He’s known about every gap and failure. You can count on it.”
“Well, I don’t know if I’d
count
on it,” Joel said, “but somehow the guy always does seem to know what OPUS is doing. Sometimes it even seems like he knows it before we do.”
“There’s no
somehow
to it,” Lila said. “And no
seems,
either.”
Joel looked up from the diagram where his gaze had fallen to find Lila staring at him with a very troubling expression. As if she knew something he didn’t. Which, if Sorcerer was involved, wasn’t good. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“I mean the reason he manages to stay one step ahead of OPUS is because he
does
know what we’re doing. Every step of the way. And he knows it, sometimes, before the field agent even gets handed the assignment.”
Joel narrowed his eyes at her. “That’s impossible. The only way he could know that would be if—”
He halted before finishing, not wanting to put voice to the thought that flashed into his head.
So Lila finished his statement for him. “Someone inside the organization has been helping him all along.”
“H
OW CAN YOU KNOW THAT
?”
Faraday asked. “And why wasn’t it in your report?”
Lila tugged meaningfully on the handcuff that still connected her to his headboard. In a fantasy, she might have found the idea of being handcuffed to the bed of a sexy stranger profoundly arousing. In reality, it was damned annoying. Probably because Joel wasn’t a stranger to her anymore. She was getting to know him pretty well. What was weird—and unwelcome—was that she still found him sexy. Where getting to know him should have made her dislike him, she instead found herself feeling curious about him. Even worse, the stuff she was curious about had nothing to do with the job they both had facing them.
“Uncuff me,” she told him, “and I’ll reveal everything.”
He arched a dark eyebrow at that.
“Everything I know,” she clarified with an exasperated sound.
The eyebrow dropped back down again, and for a minute he almost looked disappointed. Interestingly, though, his expression registered no fear at the prospect of releasing her, and that, Lila had to admit, was pretty admirable. Stupid, but admirable. Most guys wouldn’t have had the gall to cuff her in the first place. Men who’d tried to restrain her in the past had generally ended up horizontal, usually unconscious and always bloody. And even if one of them had managed to capture her—yeah, right—no way would he have been brave enough to release her while he was still anywhere in the same ZIP code.
Of course, Joel Faraday wasn’t exactly hurrying to carry out her instructions, was he? So maybe he hid his fear well. Which, to Lila, was even more admirable.
“Promise me you won’t kick my ass to Abu Dhabi and back again,” he finally said.
Okay. She’d just kick his ass to Aberdeen and back again. “I promise I won’t kick your ass to Abu Dhabi,” she vowed.
“Or back again.”
“Whatever.”
But he still didn’t move. “Promise me you won’t even kick it as far as Arlington.”
She sighed heavily. Fine. She’d just kick his ass to Foggy Bottom. “I promise I won’t kick your ass as far as Arlington,” she repeated dutifully.
“Promise me you’ll leave my ass the hell alone.”
Well, now, she didn’t want to be hasty. She’d already noticed that, even in baggy pajama bottoms, his ass was kind of nice. She might have plans for it later. After she’d kicked it around for a little while. “Look, I promise I won’t kick your ass tonight, all right?”
“Ever,” he insisted.
She bit back a growl. “All
right.
I won’t kick your ass ever. Or any of your other body parts, either,” she added when he opened his mouth to say more.
“Promise?”
This time she growled quite distinctly. “You want me to sign something in blood?”
He actually seemed to consider it for a moment.
“All
right.
” She finally ground out the words. “I promise.”
He must have believed her, because he made his way cautiously to the nightstand where he’d placed the key. And watching him move, all fluid and stealth and leisure, Lila realized she had no desire to kick his ass anyway. It really was a nice ass. And it was attached to a very nice torso. Which had extremely nice shoulders. Fastened to lusciously nice arms. In fact, she decided as she watched him palm the small key and turn toward her, it would be a shame if anything happened to
any
of Joel Faraday’s body parts. Unless, of course, his body parts happened to be naked at the time, and Lila happened to be the one doing anything—and everything—to them.
Yeah, it was definitely going to be an interesting assignment.
He hesitated a moment at the side of the bed, still just beyond her reach. Then, even more cautious than he’d been before, he extended his empty hand outward, palm up, presumably in a silent request for her to give him her hand that was uncuffed. Not sure why he would want it, Lila nevertheless started to do so without hesitation. Then, for some reason, her hand stopped when her fingertips were just shy of his. She glanced up to find him gazing at her face, a silent question in his eyes. But he didn’t move his hand forward to take hers, only waited without speaking for her to touch him first.
Still not sure why he didn’t just unlock her, and never once removing her gaze from his, she gingerly pushed her hand the remaining distance necessary to meet his. But the moment their fingers finally connected, she instinctively wanted to pull back.
It was the strangest thing. Lila never retreated from anyone without a damned good reason. As in, without a life-threatening reason. Joel Faraday was in no way a threat to her life. He wasn’t even a threat to her wrist at this point. But there was something about the way her bare palm skimmed over his—a perfectly innocent touch—that made her want to jerk back again.
She fought the sensation by dropping her gaze and focusing it on the fingers that folded gently over her hand. But for some reason, that only compounded her confusion. Because not only did Joel’s fingers nearly swallow her hand whole, he touched her in a way that made goose bumps pebble her flesh. His hand was warm, the skin duskier than hers, dusted with black hair that made it appear darker still. His fingers were long and blunt compared to her small, slender ones, unadorned save the heavy Georgetown University ring he wore on his ring finger. His was a no-nonsense hand. A working hand. A manly hand. But it held hers so gently.
Maybe that was what put her off-kilter. She’d never thought of a man’s hands in terms of gentleness before. On the contrary, men’s hands were not to be trusted.
Joel continued to hold her free hand as he bent forward to reach for her cuffed one. He had to lean over her body to get to it, and when he did, the V-neck of his T-shirt fell away from his body at eye level. That gave Lila a view of a long, muscular torso and trim waist, all of it naked, and all of it dusted by dark hair. She sucked in an involuntary breath at the sight of such masculine beauty, filling her nose with the scent of him, a scintillating mix of Dial soap, expensive cognac and raw, unmitigated male. Her heartbeat quickened in response, and in an effort to slow it, she turned her gaze to her left hand, which had pulled taut the short chain imprisoning it to the bed. But seeing Joel insert the key into the lock and give it an uneasy twitch only made her pulse skyrocket again.
Looking away once more, she found herself gazing at his throat, mere inches from her face. And she saw that she wasn’t the only one suffering from a fast, irregular pulse. Joel’s was hammering hard near his collarbone, and she could hear his breathing now, too, coming in short, ragged bursts. Heat pooled in her belly and spread, filling her breasts to bursting and making her damp between her legs.
My God,
she thought, closing her eyes. It was as if they were indulging in some kind of incredibly erotic foreplay. Yet neither had said or done anything to generate this kind of heat. Just the simple act of touching hands and being in close proximity was turning both of them on. What the hell was going on?
After loosing the cuffs from Lila’s hand and the bedpost, Joel straightened and dropped both cuffs and key back on the nightstand, then retreated to the far side of the room. And if he seemed to make the trip in record time, Lila wasn’t going to mention it. She was just happy to be able to breathe normally again. If one could consider quick, shallow, dizzying gasps to be normal.
She dropped her recently freed wrist into her other hand and rubbed idly, not so much because she needed to soothe it as she simply needed something to do with her hands that didn’t involve reaching for Joel. But when she looked at him again, he seemed to be watching what she was doing with an inordinate amount of interest. For a second time, something exploded in her belly and seeped into parts of her that were better left alone.
She did her best to ignore the sensation and return to the topic of their assignment. “Okay, here’s what I know,” she began. But her voice sounded husky and aroused, so she cleared her throat and tried again. “With that bogus attempted-murder charge floating around, I had to stay on the lam for five fuh—uh…for five freaking months,” she quickly amended.
Her language had appalled her sister, Marnie, that single evening the two of them had spent together getting caught up after being separated for virtually their entire lives. Only then had Lila realized just how rough her vocabulary was, compared to that of polite—i.e., non-OPUS—society. But she’d spent her childhood in a trailer park among neighbors who were, at best, bikers and, at worst, junkies, her adolescence on the streets of Las Vegas and her adult life in the company of spies and thugs. Language was a weapon in such environments, and Lila had simply adopted the behavior she saw practiced around her. Once she’d realized how uncomfortable it made Marnie, however, she’d done her best to gentle her vocabulary and deep-six the profanity. Even outside Marnie’s presence, Lila still tried to watch what she said and how brazenly she said it. Such was the good influence her sister had already brought to her life.
“During the five months I was lying low,” she began again, “I learned a lot of stuff about Sorcerer on my own. Stuff that I couldn’t report back to OPUS, because they’d forced me into hiding. And whattaya know, in that five months Sorcerer dropped off the face of the earth. He went into hiding, too, because he couldn’t know what OPUS was doing or where they’d be next, since I hadn’t given them any intel to go on. Without me sending in reports, his contact couldn’t send them back out again. He couldn’t know where he stood with us, so he disappeared.”
Joel studied her hard in silence for a moment, then said, “That sounds like speculation on your part.”
“It was at first,” she admitted. “So I started to dig a little deeper where I could at my end. And I had my partner do a little discreet checking around at OPUS. Between the two of us, we found evidence that there could definitely be a leak somewhere within the ranks of the organization.”
“
Could
be a leak,” Joel repeated. “Not that there definitely
is
a leak.”
“Which is why it’s not in my report,” Lila told him. “Neither of us has proof yet, but my gut tells me there’s someone inside who’s helping Sorcerer. Who’s been helping him for a long time now.”
“You think it’s someone who knew him when he was still working for OPUS? Or someone who’s come to work for us since? Is it possible it could even be someone he placed himself? Hell, how do you know it’s not me?”
“I don’t know that,” she replied honestly. “But I don’t have any reason to suspect you. Yet,” she added pointedly because…Well, just because. “I’ve thought a lot about all the possibilities, and at this point I just don’t know. It would make more sense if the leak were someone Sorcerer worked with years ago, but it could be someone he recruited, too. The guy is a charmer,” Lila said frankly. “Very charismatic. Very attractive. Very sexy.”
“Why, Miss Moreau,” Joel said in an affected, golly-gee-whiz kind of voice, “you sound like you’re the president of the Adrian Padgett aka Sorcerer Fan Club.”
“No,” she immediately denied. She hesitated before saying the rest, then figured, what the hell. Even if Joel was only her temporary partner, he was still her partner. And she was reasonably sure he wasn’t the leak in the organization, since he wasn’t a part of the information-gathering arm. Anyway, what she was about to tell him wasn’t anything Sorcerer didn’t already know. So she added, “But I’d be lying if I said I’m immune to him. There’s something about him that is undeniably seductive.”
Her remark seemed to surprise Joel, though whether it was what she’d admitted or the fact that she’d admitted it that caused the reaction, Lila couldn’t have said. Frankly, she’d surprised herself when she’d had a one-night stand with Sorcerer shortly after being assigned to the undercover team looking for him. But she’d found herself in a position where she could get close enough to him physically to potentially bring him down. She supposed she’d just taken a page from Adrian’s own notebook and overstepped the usual parameters of the job. Not that that had been the first time she’d stepped over the line. But to get as close to him as she could, she had done something she’d never done on an assignment before—or done since. She’d had a sexual liaison with the suspect.
At the time, she honestly hadn’t thought much about it. Mostly because it hadn’t been any hardship to have sex with Adrian Padgett. He was a gorgeous, sexy guy, and as such, Lila had been powerfully attracted to him on a physical level. At that time, too, she’d been going through some things in her personal life that had allowed her to disengage herself from her feelings, even more so than usual. He’d turned her on, and he’d wanted her. She’d taken advantage of both facts. Unfortunately, he’d figured out she was part of the OPUS machine before she could make use of her new position in his life.
“And were you seduced?” Faraday asked her point-blank.
“No,” she replied honestly. “When I had sex with Sorcerer, I was an active and willing participant.”
His mouth flattened into a tight line at that, and a muscle twitched in his jaw. “So you really did sleep with him?”
“I won’t apologize for what I did that night,” she told him. “It wasn’t exactly protocol, but neither was it against the rules. Plenty of agents before me—male and female—have used sex to garner information from someone they were investigating.”
“And did you?” Joel asked. “Garner information from Sorcerer?”
“Some. I could have gotten more if I’d had an opportunity to extend our…liaison. As it was, he figured out who I worked for before I had the chance.”
“And was the desire for information the only reason you slept with him?” Joel asked.
Honesty, she reminded herself. She had to be honest. So she told him, “No. It was the desire for something else. And I found Adrian Padgett to be genuinely attractive.”
“Even knowing what he is?”
“I didn’t think about what he is,” she said. “I thought about how he made me feel. How he made my body feel,” she corrected herself. Since that was the only place she’d felt anything while she was with him.