Express Male (11 page)

But why would a supersecret government organization create a bogus birth certificate for a woman who lived in the Cleveland suburbs and played the piano in a department store?

“And your social security number, Marnie,” he continued as if he could read her thoughts and see her doubt.

“What about it?” she asked, her voice sounding as if it were coming from a very long distance away. “Is it bogus, too?”

“No, it’s the real thing,” he said.

She opened her eyes again, to see him extending the card toward her. “But the first three numbers are known as area numbers and refer to geographical locations. They’re assigned according to the address provided by the applicant on the application for the social security number. Ohio applicants are always given a first number of either two or three. Always. Nevada residents are always assigned a first number of five. Always. Your social security number starts with—”

“A five,” she finished for him.

“That means your father applied for your social security card while he—and you—were living in Nevada. And your number is very, very close to Lila’s in chronology, meaning they were processed at roughly the same time.”

Marnie’s focus ricocheted from her social security card to her Nevada birth certificate and back again, too many thoughts pounding in her head for her to make sense of any of them. Except one. Her father had lied to her. And he’d kept
a lot
of important information from her.

“None of this makes sense,” she said as she ran her fingers over the information on the Nevada certificate, as if touching it might make her feel she was part of it.

“Where would my father have gotten a forged birth certificate for me? And why? Why didn’t he tell me about my mother and my sister and that I was born somewhere else? What could he have possibly been protecting me from?”

Because that had to be the reason he had done what he did, Marnie decided. Her father had loved her more than anything. She knew it not just because he told her that virtually every day, but by the way he’d treated her. He had adored her. Just as she had adored him. They’d been two of a kind. A team. A family. Bonded in more ways than most people ever knew. He’d never lied to her about
anything.
She’d always been so certain of that. Until now.

“We may never know the answer to those questions,” Tennant said. “But he must have had his reasons.”

We,
she echoed to herself. As if Tennant had a vested interest in this. Then she remembered that he did, in a way.

“Do you have my…Do you have Lila’s birth certificate, too?” she asked.

“I have three, actually,” he told her as he selected a trio of documents from the bottomless envelope. “First, we have a bogus copy, like yours, except that the only false information is the fact that hers was a multiple birth. According to this one, she wasn’t a twin, either. Then we have the original that says she is. And then we have a different falsified one that not only excludes mention of a twin birth, but also contains a phony name on the line for father. And the forger for that one was OPUS.”

“Why would OPUS falsify Lila’s birth certificate?” she asked. “That really doesn’t make sense. Unless it was part of some undercover thing for her.” And then another question erupted in her brain. “Does she know about me?”

Tennant’s expression by now was so flat, Marnie had no idea what he was thinking. But of all the questions, she’d just asked, the only answer he gave her was, “Yeah, let’s say it was for some undercover thing, all right? And let’s leave it at that.”

“But—”

“Let’s leave it at that, Marnie,” he said again, more adamantly.

Although leaving it was the last thing she wanted, another look at Tennant’s expression told her it would be best to do so. For now. He passed her the copy of Lila’s original birth certificate, and Marnie saw that it contained the same information as hers, except that Lisa…Lila…her sister…had been born eleven minutes later than she, and weighed three ounces less.

“A little sister,” she said out loud, stumbling over the words. “I have a little sister.”

And then, like a truckload of bogus documents, an even more staggering realization hit her. “Is my mother still alive?”

She snapped her attention up to Agent Tennant’s face again, but her momentary happiness evaporated when she saw his expression.

“I’m sorry, no. She passed away six months ago.”

Only six months. Marnie had been so close to knowing her mother.

No, she told herself. Not to knowing her mother. To meeting a stranger. Susan Townsend felt no more like her mother than Lucie Lundy had been. So, in a way, Marnie had no mother at all. Not even the lovely fantasy her father had created for her.

“Agent Tennant,” she began softly.

“Noah,” he corrected her. “Please. Call me Noah. I did, after all, just shatter your world.”

He smiled with what she supposed was meant to be compassion, but it somehow looked like pity instead. Clearly, he was a man who didn’t have a lot of experience with compassion. Still, she was grateful for his attempt, if not much comforted by it.

When she felt herself falling, deeper and deeper into the blue, blue depths of his eyes, she looked at her lap again. “Noah,” she said. But, for some reason, calling him by his first name felt even more awkward than calling him Agent Tennant. “I won’t say I appreciate you bringing all this to my attention, because, quite frankly, I would have rather spent the rest of my life in ignorance of it.”

“Would you?”

She glanced up again, and her voice a lot steadier than she felt as she stated, “Yes. I would.”

She told herself she was being honest. Truth be told, however, she really couldn’t say how she felt at the moment. It was too much to have dumped in her lap in one sitting. Too much to consider. Too much to respond to. Too much to feel. It might be months before she could get a handle on any of it. It might be never.

“But I’m not sure why you’ve brought it to my attention,” she continued. “I mean, you could have come back here this morning and returned my social security card and my phony birth certificate and told me ‘Yep, you’re Marnie Lundy all right, sorry to have bothered you,’ and then left me alone feeling vaguely threatened by financial retaliation if I ever told anyone about you. Instead, you’ve turned my life upside down and made me feel threatened in a different way. In spite of your occupation, you seem like a nice man. I don’t know why you’d do something like this.”

As she spoke, his expression never wavered from what it had been since he sat down: mild concern, however manufactured it may have been. But as she uttered that final sentiment, suddenly, somehow, he looked as if he cared too much.

“I didn’t mean to make you feel threatened,” he said.

“In any way. But you’re right. There is a reason I’ve told you all this.”

Marnie said nothing, but found herself holding her breath as she waited for him to elaborate.

“As we told you last night, Lila Moreau is the best agent we have, and she disappeared five months ago under unusual circumstances, in the middle of an assignment. We have no idea where she is, or why she hasn’t surfaced before now, especially in light of the fact that…”

“What?” Marnie said when his voice trailed off.

He expelled an uncomfortable sound, then revealed, “Especially in light of the fact that she knows about your existence.”

“But you just said—”

“I misled you.”

“You mean you lied to me,” she corrected him. And Marnie was getting awfully tired of being lied to.

“I needed to see how you would react to all this before I told you the truth.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re worried something may have happened to Lila. Something bad. Considering who she is, with the contacts she has at her fingertips, once she discovered your existence, it shouldn’t have taken her any time at all to find you. The fact that she hasn’t come forward to contact you concerns us.”

Marnie would bet good money that wasn’t the only thing that had them concerned.

“And now that I’ve reacted?” she said. “What made you decide to tell me this?”

“You’re keeping yourself together pretty well in light of having learned some things this morning that—”

“Shattered my world?” she supplied helpfully.

“That could make a substantial difference in your life,” he amended. “It isn’t every day a person learns that her origins aren’t what she’s been led to believe for thirty-three years by the person she trusted most in the world.”

Marnie lifted her chin a defensive inch. “Like you said, I’m made of pretty stern stuff.” Of course, that quivering-mass-of-goo thing was right there at the fringes of her brain again.

“You are,” he agreed. “Even having known you a short time, I can see you have all the qualities that make a good OPUS agent. Which leads me to what I’m trying to say,” he continued. “We at OPUS would like to offer you a job.”

N
OAH WATCHED AN ARRAY
of emotions parade across Marnie’s face—first confusion, then amusement, then recognition, then disbelief, finally arriving at horror. Yep, that about covered his own reaction to his superior’s instructions of the previous evening. Followed by two hours of trying to talk the other man out of what he wanted to do.

Two guesses who’d won that argument.

“A job?” she echoed in obvious disbelief.

Noah nodded.

“But I already have two jobs. I don’t think I have time for a third. Not to mention—and I think this may have escaped your notice—I’m in no way qualified for the position of top-secret crime fighter.”

“We can rectify that,” he told her. Okay, lied to her. Details, details.

She looked at him blankly. “I see. And how would you change me from a mild-mannered music teacher into a kick-butt spy?”

Noah put everything he had into making his next statement sound in every way confident and in no way ridiculous. “By putting you through an intensive, two-week training session.”

Man,
had that sounded in no way confident and in every way ridiculous.

Marnie seemed to think so, too, because she stared at him as if he’d just smacked her across the face with a big, wet fish. She emitted a little sputtering sound of apprehension. Then she looked like maybe she was about to throw up.

“An intensive training session,” she repeated doubtfully.

He nodded.

“For two weeks.”

He nodded again, ignoring the feeling in his stomach that made him want to throw up, too. “We’re certain we can teach you everything you’d need to know in two weeks’ time,” he said, hoping she couldn’t detect his uncertainty.

“Everything I’d need to know for what?”

“To pass yourself off as Lila Moreau for as long as it takes to draw out Adrian Padgett, aka Sorcerer, so we can apprehend him.”

She looked at Noah the same way she might look at a meteorite that had just crashed through her living-room ceiling. “The man you rescued me from the other night,” she said. “You want to use me as bait to catch him.”

Noah nodded. “Only this time, we’ll be ready for him.”

Her eyebrows shot up at that. “Will you?”

“Yes.”

“He got away the last time you tried to catch him.”

Noah didn’t bother mentioning that Sorcerer had gotten away from them a lot more often than that. Instead he said, “That’s because I didn’t go after him. I thought you were the bigger prize.” Then he realized what he’d said, and hastily corrected himself. “I mean, I thought
Lila
was the bigger prize.”

She nodded with something akin to resignation, muttered what sounded like “Story of my life,” and looked at the other side of the porch.

“We could really use your help,” he said, adopting his most solicitous voice. Then, what the hell, he decided to play the patriotic card. “The whole country could use your help.”

She did look back at him then, but it was to treat him to an expression that said silently,
Oh, please. How stupid do you think I am?
So he decided to go back to not underestimating her and laying out the facts straight, since, hey, that had worked so well before.

“Three times he’s eluded us, Marnie. Lila’s the only person who’s been able to maintain contact with him. He approached you at the mall because he thinks you’re Lila. He will almost certainly try to contact you again.”

“He tried to assault me that night,” she reminded him.

“I don’t want to think about what might have happened if you hadn’t shown up when you did.”

Noah didn’t want to think about that, either. But Marnie needed to understand exactly what was what. “He thinks you’re Lila,” he repeated. “And he may come looking for you again.”

That got her attention in a way nothing else had this morning.

“Do you think he knows where I live?”

“You’re not that hard to find,” Noah told her. “Especially for a man like him.”

“He wanted more than information from Lila the other night,” she said. “He indicated that the two of them had been…”

“What?” Noah asked, thinking maybe Marnie had been privy to something the rest of them hadn’t.

She glanced at the other side of the porch again. “Something he said made clear he thought he and I had had…sexual relations,” she finally revealed.

This was news to Noah. But not surprising. “What did he say?”

A bright spot of pink blossomed on Marnie’s cheek. She was blushing, he marveled. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen anyone blush. Over anything.

“I’d rather not repeat it,” she said. “Just know that Mr. Padgett and your agent have been intimate. To put it politely.”

Noah nodded philosophically. Using sex to extract information from a target or a source wasn’t exactly something OPUS condoned, but neither did they rule it out if the agent engaging in the practice—regardless of gender—thought sex might produce results. Agents were generally left to their own discretion when it came to that. And OPUS always turned a blind eye.

“If Lila slept with Sorcerer,” he said, “it was only because she thought she could glean information from him.”

Still not looking at Noah, Marnie said, “Yes, well, bartering my sexuality isn’t something I want to learn to do. Especially not from you people in an intensive, two-week training session.”

“We’d never ask or expect—” He halted, trying a different tack. “Look, Marnie, I won’t lie to you. What we’re asking you to do is dangerous. Sorcerer is unpredictable. But you would be shadowed every second and every step by someone in our organization. You wouldn’t be taking him on alone.”

“Agent Tennant,” she said.

“Noah,” he corrected her.

“Noah,” she amended. But she didn’t seem comfortable with the familiarity. “I appreciate the enormity of what your organization is facing right now. But I couldn’t do what you’re asking me to do, even if you trained me for two years.”

“How can you be so sure?” he asked. “Marnie, I’ve watched you over the past couple of days. Most people would have fallen apart during what you went through at our facility. Hell, even before that. You were approached by three strange men and endangered by two. Then you were thrown into a situation you couldn’t understand that must have felt just as threatening. But you never backed down once. You never even bent. And after everything I’ve told you today about your past and yourself, you’re rock steady right now.”

“Only on the outside,” she said.

“No,” he disagreed. “I can’t imagine what’s going through your head right now after all this, but I
can
see that you’re rock steady there, too. You have a lot to think about, but that’s the point. You’ll think about it, not react blindly to it. And ultimately, you’ll accept what you have to accept. You’re the sort of person who takes the punches she can’t duck, but hits back hard when she has to. You can do this. At least long enough for us to catch Sorcerer.”

She sighed heavily. “Then maybe I just don’t want to do it.”

“But—”

“Agent Tennant,” she said, using the more formal address in spite of his invitation to use his first name, “I have a good life, one that I enjoy very much. It’s quiet. It’s peaceful. It’s stable. It’s secure. Or, at least, it was until the other night. I
like
it that way. I don’t want to invite chaos into it. And doing what you want me to do would be inviting in a lot more than that. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ve had enough turbulence for one day.” She emitted a nervous chuckle of apprehension. “In fact, thanks to you, I’ve had enough turbulence over the last few days to last me the rest of my life.”

“Marnie, I—”

She stood abruptly before he could finish and turned to face him. “Thank you for returning my things, Agent Tennant. And I appreciate your telling me about my sister. I have a lot to think about. So I hope you’ll forgive me if I say goodbye to you now and return to what’s left of my regularly scheduled life.”

And without a further word—or a backward glance, for that matter—she strode to her front door, opened it and passed through it, closing it securely behind her. Noah wouldn’t say she slammed it exactly…Oh, hell. Yes, she did. Then she punctuated the action with a sound that was both symbolic and unmistakable: the thrusting of a dead bolt firmly into place.

B
Y BEDTIME
Wednesday night, there was no longer any doubt in Marnie’s mind that she had crashed through the guardrail on the highway of life, careened into the river of the netherworld and was now firmly and finally on the voyage of the damned.

So far this week, she’d been mistaken for a very dangerous woman, manhandled by an international criminal, kidnapped by a spy, discovered that her origins and her family weren’t what she’d been led to believe her entire life and suffered through little Skylar McNamara playing not “The Tiresome Woodpecker,” as Marnie had assigned to her, but “Great Balls of Fire,” which her father had taught her instead. And it was only Wednesday. Good God, what else was going to happen this week?

And, oh,
dammit,
why had she just invited all kinds of worst-case scenarios into it by saying that?

Of all the weirdness that had occurred over the past few days, though, the weirdest had to be how thoughts of Noah Tennant kept intruding into her brain. Thoughts about how handsome he was. About the velvety timbre of his voice and the poetry of his body’s movement. About his offer of a job. About how she might actually be kind of interested in learning how to barter her sexuality in two weeks’ time—or less—if the instructor in the course was Noah Tennant.

Oh, she really did have to start getting out more.

She’d even taken his business card, which she’d found stuck in her doorjamb Wednesday afternoon—and on the back of which he had scrawled what he identified as his home phone number—and put it in her lingerie drawer along with her most treasured bits of ephemera: the sixteenth birthday card from her father, her high-school commencement program announcing her as salutatorian, her invitation to her friend Megan’s wedding, the birth announcement of her godchild Sam. What could have possibly compelled her to put it there? And why was it there still?

Now, as she readied herself for bed that evening, she was, inescapably, thinking about Noah again. The man had even invaded her dreams at night. And in those dreams, the poetry of his body’s movement had taken on a whole ’nother meaning. Mostly because his body hadn’t been wearing many clothes in some of her dreams about him. Okay,
any
clothes in some of her dreams about him. Okay, in a
lot
of her dreams about him.

Oh, all right, in
all
of her dreams about him.

Truly, she did need to get out more.

After soaking away the day’s travails in a bubble bath—and also drinking away the day’s travails with a glass of very nice pinot noir—Marnie donned her favorite pajama bottoms decorated with whimsical blue moons and bright yellow stars, and slipped on an oversize yellow, man-style nightshirt. Then she went to the kitchen to pour herself another glass of very nice pinot noir.

At midnight, she was sitting up in bed, noting that she had been reading the same page of a new book for twenty minutes straight and was nowhere close to feeling sleepy. She glanced at the empty wineglass on her nightstand and considered the pros and cons of a third glass. Pro, it might make her pass out into a blissful oblivion where Noah Tennant was nowhere to be found, or, if he was, he would be fully clothed for a change. Which, on second thought, might be a con, at least where the part about being clothed came in. A bigger con would be that she’d have to spend her hour-long Thursday afternoon lesson with Tad “Mad Man” Merriweather hungover.

Blissful oblivion with no Noah Tennant. Mad Man Merriweather with a hangover.

Well, there was no contest. Mad Man Merriweather couldn’t possibly be any worse that he already was, even with a hangover. Unless, of course, Mad Man was the one with the hangover. But since he was only six, that wasn’t likely. Then again, if he was, it would explain a lot.

Collecting her glass, Marnie headed to the kitchen. She had uncorked the bottle and was about to tip it over the glass she’d set on the countertop when, without warning, one steely arm wrapped around her throat while an iron-gripped hand forced her free arm behind her back. Both bottle and glass went crashing to the floor, the latter smashing into a cluster of jagged pieces around her bare feet, the former spilling what was left of its contents into a ruddy river that streamed through and around the shattered fragments of the glass.

Instinctively, she hooked her pouring hand over the elbow at her throat, pulling with all her might to ease the pressure, not that she thought for a moment it would do any good. Surprisingly, the arm loosened enough to allow her to gasp for breath. The one pinning her hand behind her back, however, tensed, sparking a sharp pain that shot from her shoulder blade to her wrist.

When she cried out, the man eased his hold on her a bit more, enough that the pain was quelled, but not enough that she was able to move anything but her free hand, which she tightened even more over his elbow. Although she couldn’t see him, she knew it was the man who had accosted her in the mall parking lot Monday night. Adrian Padgett, she recalled Noah saying earlier when he’d shattered her world. Adrian smelled tonight the way he had then, a sophisticated fragrance of spice and sea spray and expensive male that was more appropriate for a champagne-sipping, tuxedo-clad bon vivant than a slimy little scumbag on the lam from the heat.