Express Male (13 page)

Instead of turning on the light, he stepped silently into the records room and closed the door behind himself, thinking maybe he could surprise whoever was back there and blackmail them into giving him a piece of the action. He picked his way carefully through the darkened rows of file cabinets, keeping both his ear tuned to any hint of movement and his body between his quarry and the exit. Only when he was certain he had his target cornered did he finally speak.

“Whatever you’re up to, I want in. Especially if you’re going to take out that new guy in radiology. I hate that asshole.”

Much to his surprise, a familiar feminine voice piped up out of the darkness. “Daniel?”

“Ellie?” Who could she be trying to stick it to? She’d only been working here two days.

A spray of light erupted, and there stood Ellie, an arm’s length away with a tiny penlight clutched in her hand with her keys dangling from the other end of it.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. “After hours? In the dark?”

“Uh…trying to finish my work,” she said. “After hours. In the dark. Lucky I’ve got a flashlight on my keychain, huh?”

Something in Daniel went on alert. There was just a strange vibe coming from Ellie. “What’s wrong with the lights?”

“They went off about an hour ago.” She threw him a puzzled look. Well, kind of puzzled. Something in her expression was a little…off. “What?” she added. “Isn’t the whole building dark?”

Daniel shook his head. “No. The rest of the building is fine.”

“Really?” she asked, looking incredulous now. Well, kind of incredulous. There was still something in her expression that was a little…off. “I figured the electricity must have gone out in the whole building.”

“The electricity never goes out,” he said. “We have generators. If there’s a power failure, they automatically kick on. The lights might flicker during the changeover, but they don’t go out. Ever. And they didn’t even flicker tonight.”

“Well, then there’s a short circuit in this room or something,” she said.

The hairs on the back of Daniel’s neck shot straight to attention. There was just something about Ellie that was…wrong. “I got in using the keypad with no problem,” he told her. “If the power was out in here, that keypad wouldn’t have worked.”

“Well, something is wrong,” she insisted.

Yeah, she had that right.

He dropped his gaze to the penlight in her hand, then lower, to where the jacket of her dark-red suit cinched in at her waist and then flared out again over curvy hips he’d never noticed before. Well, not before yesterday, anyway. Then his attention wandered lower still, over the brief red skirt and the slender legs. Who would have guessed a woman Ellie’s size would have such long legs? His gaze traveled up again, to where the collar of her jacket dipped low enough to reveal a little of the dusky valley between her breasts. Strangely, though, none of those things really held his attention. What really held his attention was the fat file folder she had tucked beneath her arm.

Not sure why he wanted or needed to know, he asked, “What do you have there?”

Her eyes widened just the tiniest bit, in a way a casual observer might not have even noticed. But Daniel wasn’t a casual observer. He was Ellie’s friend. He knew her better than he knew just about anyone. Or, at least, he thought he had. Before she’d started dressing in a way that was meant to distract a man, should he stumble upon her in a darkened room doing something she shouldn’t be doing.

“It’s the last of the files I need to put back,” she said. And Daniel was certain he wasn’t imagining it now. She definitely sounded edgy and anxious. And that wasn’t like Ellie at all. “Then I’m, you know, going home. But, hey, now that you’re here, why don’t we go out for a beer, huh? It’s been a while since we did something like that.”

He wasn’t sure how he knew, but she was lying about the file. What he didn’t know was why. “Ellie, what are you doing here?” he asked again.

“I’m working,” she told him.

“No, you’re not. You’re up to something. And if you don’t do some ’splainin’ pretty quick, I’m going to think that whatever it is, it’s no good.”

She said nothing for a moment, only looked at Daniel in a way that made him think she was running through a million rehearsed lines she had stored in her head, trying to find one that might work. Ultimately, she ended up muttering a ripe expletive, one he’d never heard her use before, and she repeated it a half-dozen times. And hearing such a filthy word coming out of the mouth of someone as cute and sweet and nice as Ellie Chandler was frankly shocking. And offensive. And obscene.

And unbelievably, outrageously erotic.

“Dammit,” she snapped when she was through. “Only two days into the job and I’ve already blown it.”

Daniel narrowed his eyes at her. “Something tells me we’re not talking about auditing for Uncle Sam. So what the hell is going on?”

E
LLIE SETTLED
more comfortably into the booth at Java Jerome’s, blew on the oversize latte to cool it and avoided Daniel’s gaze. She couldn’t believe what she’d done. Two days into her field assignment, and she’d already blown it. Caught red-handed by the one person she hadn’t even worried about misleading, a person she was supposed to be investigating, for God’s sake. Some kick-ass spy she was turning out to be. So much for moving to the head of the class. She’d be lucky if they let her be a bathroom monitor after this.

“Come on, Ellie, what the hell is going on? What were you doing in the records room tonight?”

It was perhaps the tenth time Daniel had asked that since they’d left ChemiTech, and she still didn’t know what to tell him. According to Spying 101, Espionage for Dumbass Spies, having been caught doing something she shouldn’t by a suspect, Ellie was supposed to render him helpless and hold him hostage until her assignment was completed. As appealing as the idea of having Daniel tied spread-eagle to her bed was, however, she knew she had to be honest with him.

So she told him truthfully, “I was working.”

“Ellie…”

“I was,” she insisted. “Just not for ChemiTech.”

“Who then? Some rival company? Is someone paying you to steal our secrets?”

She gaped at him. Did he really think she was capable of something so shallow and selfish? Something so lacking in morals? That made her sound like the women he dated. So why the hell wasn’t he asking her out?

“Is that why you’ve got the new look?” he asked when she didn’t reply.

He’d noticed her new look? Her tarty new look? Before Ellie could stop it, an extremely unprofessional ripple of pleasure wound through her. “What new look?” she hedged. Fished. Whatever.

He rolled his eyes. “Oh, please. The short skirt? The tight jacket? The fondle-me hair? You’re dressed like…like…like…”

“Like Pamela Anderson in
VIP?
” she suggested helpfully.

“Like bait,” he said.

So much for fishing. There was nothing like being compared to chum to make a woman feel sexy. Add to it the fact that not only did he think she was shallow and selfish and amoral, but he was noticing the tarty way she’d been dressing, yet he
still
hadn’t asked her out, and Ellie was left wondering just what the hell a girl had to do to get Daniel Beck’s attention. Other than break into his place of employment. At this rate, she’d be showing him her piece next. Uh, her gun, she meant. Her weapon. Though, all modesty aside, her piece
was
nice enough to use as a weapon. Certainly it would complement Daniel’s gun. He had a nice piece, too.

Enough!
she scolded herself. Man, she really wasn’t fit to be an agent if she strayed from the course this easily and thoroughly. She had opened her mouth to begin explaining—not that she had any idea how to go about doing that—when Daniel started talking again.

“That file you had tonight was for one of my projects. I’m not going to ask you again, Ellie. What. The hell. Is going. On.”

Her conscience warred with her obligations to OPUS. But a bigger battle was waging between her head and her heart. In spite of the evidence to suggest Daniel was up to something, Ellie just couldn’t bring herself to believe he was the leak at ChemiTech. Whatever money had gone into his bank account, he hadn’t used it for himself. He still drove his ratty old motorcycle, and he still couldn’t afford his own lunch. Yeah, he probably dropped some decent cash on dates with his bimbos, but none of them were the type to require major upkeep. And if Daniel had lied to her about his past, then he must have had a good reason for doing so.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” she said.

He arched his dark eyebrows at that. “I thought I was the one who was supposed to be asking questions.”

She eyed him back just as seriously as he was considering her. “If you answer my questions honestly, then I’ll answer yours honestly. Deal?”

“Fair enough,” he said.

“Why did you lie to me about growing up in Santa Barbara?”

His mouth dropped open in response to the question. “What makes you think I lied about that?”

“Just answer my question honestly. I know you didn’t move there until you started college at UC. So why did you lie about where you grew up?”

He blew out an exasperated sound and lowered his eyes into his espresso double shot. “I didn’t want you—or anyone else—to know about where I came from,” he said. “Apache Junction doesn’t exactly have a reputation for being the most glamorous place on the planet.”

“Neither does Detroit, where I grew up. I still love the place.”

“Yeah, I know. And it’s not that I hate Apache Junction,” he added. “I don’t. I hate the person I was when I lived there.”

“And what kind of person was that?” Ellie asked softly.

“A total loser,” he said without hesitation. “I was a complete geek in high school. And even before that. I had no friends, no social life, no dates.”

“No basketball letter?”

He blew out a joyless chuckle. “The only letters I got were the ones the school counselor sent home to my parents, expressing her concern over my…how did she put it? My ‘sullen and dissociative personality.’”

“Sounds serious.”

He shook his head. “I was fifteen. Who isn’t sullen and dissociative at that age?”

“Peter Pan?” Ellie supplied helpfully. “The Olsen twins?”

“Yeah, and look how they turned out.”

“Well, let’s see,” she said, ticking off her reply on her fingers. “Peter can fly, has never worked a day in his life and foists his sewing off on Wendy. The Olsens are cultural icons worth a gazillion dollars who will never have to work again if they don’t want to.” She lifted her hands up over her head and added, “Let’s hear it for the perky and sociative!”

He managed a chuckle for that. “You were a perky and sociative fifteen-year-old, weren’t you?”

“Well, not as perky and sociative as most, but…” She sighed. “Can I ask you another personal question and will you answer it honestly?”

He nodded. “What the hell,” he muttered. “If I can’t be honest with you, I’m not much of a friend, am I?”

Something twisted painfully inside her at that. He was right, of course. Which was exactly why she planned to tell him the truth about herself, too, as soon as she had the answers she wanted—needed—from him.

“Why were there two large deposits, one for fifteen thousand and one for twenty thousand, made to your bank account in the last year, and where did the money go when you withdrew it?”

His eyes went wide at that, and his mouth dropped open. If he was faking his surprise, he deserved an Academy Award. “What the hell are you talking about? I haven’t made any deposits like that to my account. And I sure as hell haven’t withdrawn that much. If I found thirty-five thousand dollars in my account, I’d be in Cancún.”

Ellie wasn’t sure why, but she believed him. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time someone had parked hot money in a legitimate account for a day or two to muck up the money trail. Any good hacker could remove it again without evidence of its ever having been there in the first place, leaving the owner of the account entirely in the dark.

“I believe you,” she said.

“So does that mean I get to ask my questions now?” he said.

She nodded.

“How do you know about all this stuff?”

“It’s my job to know,” she told him.

“Accountants don’t know stuff like this. Okay, maybe the banking, but not the Apache Junction. How did you find out where I grew up? I’ve never told anyone that since I left there. And my family all live somewhere else now. I haven’t been there for about ten years.”

“I’m not an accountant,” Ellie said.

“So you lied to me, too,” he replied quietly.

“I had no choice,” she told him. “What I do for a living is top secret. My parents don’t even know about it, and they used to work for the same organization.”

“And that organization would be…what?” he asked.

“CIA? FBI? KGB?” When she hesitated, he added, “C’mon, Ellie. I’d appreciate an answer ASAP. Or is it SOP to remain on the QT about your job? You trying to mind your
p’
s and
q’
s, like you promised on your CV? I’d like an answer. PDQ. OK?”