Express Male (27 page)

Ellie shook her head. “You didn’t.”

He glared at her. “I just said I did, didn’t I? Look, just listen, Ellie, all right? Maybe you’ll learn something.”

She gaped at him. “Oh, don’t you dare start—”

“So while I was looking around in his office,” Daniel interjected, “I found some locked files on his computer.”

Ellie closed her eyes.

“And I hacked into them.”

Oh, damn.

“And the stuff I found…”

“What?” she asked, opening her eyes again. “It couldn’t be anything incriminating, because I checked the computers of everyone at ChemiTech who’s had contact with Sebastian Baird in the last two years. Including Truman.
I
hacked into his files, too,” she said. “And I didn’t find anything anywhere that was in any way helpful.”

Daniel set his jaw tight. “Then you weren’t looking in the right places,” he told her. “This stuff was buried deep in hidden files where he’d locked them up tight. I had to go in about ten times to find them. The only reason I did is because I know enough about the guy to know how he operates and what kind of security precautions he takes. You may have looked for the files, Ellie, but
I’m
the one who found them. Now do you want to know what was in them, or not?”

In spite of the way he’d gone about it, she was eager to know what he’d found. And not to put too fine a point on the whole sucky-spy thing, but she found herself wishing she’d been half as effective doing her job as Daniel had been doing her job. But if he’d found something that was indeed incriminating, how was she supposed to include it in her report? It wasn’t a problem that he’d found helpful information in a way that was, at best, unethical and at worst, illegal. Since 9/11, OPUS had been moved under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security and had been awarded certain “privileges” that other government agencies didn’t have. Put simply, they operated by their own rules. And most of those rules changed daily.

So the problem wasn’t that they wouldn’t be able to use any information Daniel might have discovered. The problem lay in the fact that it was a civilian who had done the discovering. OPUS wasn’t too crazy about civilians. Even useful ones. Because civilians didn’t swear an oath of fealty the way operatives and agents did. Worse, civilians tended to have families and responsibilities and obligations outside the organization, all of which might potentially be endangered. And not necessarily by the enemies of OPUS. Sometimes that danger came from OPUS itself. By virtue of having learned what he had, Daniel had thrown himself not just into her employer’s spotlight, but into their headlights, too.

“Yes,” she finally said. “I want to know what you found.”

He reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a memory stick. “It’s all on here,” he told her. “Not that I can make heads or tails of a lot of it, but I figure that’s your people’s jobs, right? I do understand enough of it to know this guy is doing things he shouldn’t be, and he’s sending information he shouldn’t be sending to places he shouldn’t be sending it.” As Ellie closed her fingers around the memory stick, he added, “Obviously I have my uses.”

He put a subtle emphasis on that last word, just enough to make Ellie take notice of it. For a second, she was confused, but when she looked at his face, she understood. “You think I used you for this assignment?” she asked incredulously.

“Well, what else would you call it?” he demanded.

“I didn’t use you!” she denied. “You blackmailed me into letting you help! I didn’t want you involved at all!”

“No shit!” he exclaimed. “You made it more than clear that you didn’t want me around! But you oughta be damned grateful I was!”

She blew out an exasperated sound and was about to lash out at him again, when something in his expression halted her. It hit her then, like a ton of illicit memory sticks, that maybe, just maybe, Daniel wasn’t mad at her because she’d dismissed him from the job. Maybe, just maybe, he was mad at her because he thought she’d dismissed him from so much more.

She chose her next words carefully. “I am grateful you’re around, Daniel. I’ve been grateful for that since the day you moved in next door. In more ways than you know.”

He seemed to go slack at her words. All the tension, all the anger, all the resentment seemed to ease right out of him. His expression opened, his body relaxed. And his voice softened when he said, “Well, you sure as hell haven’t made me feel like it lately.”

She hesitated only a moment before saying, “And you’ve never made me feel like it.” There was no accusation in her voice when she said it. No resentment. No anger. It was just a simple statement of fact.

His expression turned confused. “What are you talking about? I’ve always been grateful for you.”

“Not the way you’re grateful for other women,” she said.

His confusion seemed to compound at that. “I’m not grateful for other women. They’re a dime a dozen. They’re not like you. You’re…”

“What?” she asked, a spark of hope kindling to life inside her.

“Special,” he said cautiously.

She shook her head. “No, I’m not. I’m just like every other woman you know.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Because I…Because we…”

“What?” he asked, the word coming out urgent and insistent.

“Because of that night in Baird’s office,” she finally said. “When you and I…When we…”

But she halted without finishing again, because she still didn’t know how to identify what had happened that night. Actually, that wasn’t true. She knew exactly what it had been for her. She just didn’t know if it had been the same thing for Daniel.

“When we made love?” he finished for her.

Oh. Okay. So it had been the same thing for him. Now the hope flamed higher, melting the ice that had coated her belly since his arrival at her front door. In spite of that, she still sounded doubtful when she asked, “Is that what it was? Making love?”

“Don’t you think so?”

Very slowly, she nodded. “But I didn’t think you did.”

He took a step toward her, then seemed to reconsider his approach and halted. “What else could it have been?”

Ellie took a step toward him, too. “The same thing it always is with you and women. Sex.”

Daniel completed another step. Stopped. “What happened with you was a lot better than anything that’s happened with anyone else.”

Ellie strode forward one more time, something that brought their bodies very close to touching. “It was different for me, too,” she said. “A lot different.”

“A lot better?” he asked, hope tinting his words, too.

She nodded. “Yeah. A lot, lot, lot better.”

He lifted a hand to her face, opening his palm over her jaw. Ellie tilted her head to the side to complete the fit, then covered his hand with hers. The angry heat inside her turned to a mellow warmth, then began to spread outward, warming parts of her that hadn’t been warm for a while. Not since that night in Sebastian Baird’s office. Not since Daniel had stopped being a part of her life.

“So what are we going to do about it?” he asked softly. He dipped his head to hers and brushed a kiss over her temple, moving his other hand to her hair. “Besides make sure it happens again, I mean.”

What a loaded question, Ellie thought as she opened her hand on his chest, over his heart. Really, it could mean two different things. What were they going to do about the new direction their relationship seemed to be taking, and what were they going to do about Daniel’s discoveries for OPUS? The first, she figured, would be hard to answer and easy to carry out. The second would be just the opposite. Naturally, she would hide Daniel’s involvement in her assignment, but would still be honest about her own shortcomings. Getting OPUS to go along with the whole “anonymous source” thing, though, would be a feat of herculean proportions.

She pushed herself up on tiptoe and kissed him, then wove the fingers of both hands through his and dropped them to their sides. “We’re going to save the you-and-me part of that equation for later,” she said with a smile. “We have to finish our OPUS work first.”

He looked as if he was about to object, then relented. “Okay. I guess you’re right. The OPUS thing has a specific time line and definite end in sight. And the you-and-me thing has all the time in the world and is in no way finite.”

Oh, she did like the sound of that.

He kissed her again…twice…three times…four…then stepped back with obvious reluctance and returned to unpacking their dinner. “So what
are
we going to do about OPUS?” he asked.

As Ellie helped him unpack everything, she said, “It’ll probably take me all night, but I need to look at the information you collected and analyze it. Try to figure out how it ties in with what OPUS already knows and what we found in Truman’s computer. And I’ll have to include all of it in the report I’m sending to Noah in the morning. But I won’t mention you by name,” she was quick to add. “I’ll identify you as an anonymous source. I just hope they’ll leave it at that.”

“You can mention my name, Ellie, I don’t mind. In fact—”

“I mind,” she interrupted him. “Daniel, it could put you in danger if anyone found out you were involved. And I couldn’t live with myself if anything happened to you because of me. I couldn’t live with myself if anything happened to you period.”

He smiled at that. “Whatever you say. You’re the kick-ass spy.”

She wished. But there was no reason to go into that with Daniel right now. She had too many other things to think about.

“I’ll need you here with me tonight,” she said. “Do you mind?”

“To clarify stuff you find in the files?” he asked.

“Well, that, too,” she told him. “But mostly I just need you around tonight because I, you know, need you around tonight.”

“Oh, well, in that case…”

“Thanks for bringing dinner,” she added as she unpacked the last of the cartons. “Spy work makes for a ferocious appetite.”

“Well, we have dim sum for starters,” he told her. Then he smiled. “And maybe, if you get this report finished before dawn, we might have time for a nice dessert, too…”

E
LLIE HAD KNOWN
she was in it hip deep before she even received Noah’s summons to his office—though she had expected that summons to take a little longer than the six hours that had passed since she turned in her report. But it wasn’t until she opened the door and entered that she realized she was actually in it up to her eyeballs. Because where she’d expected the hot seat to be empty in anticipation of her own ass-chewing, instead it held Daniel Beck. And his ass didn’t look any too comfortable, either.

“Daniel,” she said softly, unable to stop the word before it leaped out of her mouth.

“I asked him to sit in on this meeting, too,” Noah said.

“Because what I have to say involves both of you. And will affect both of you.”

He was using his octave-lower-than-usual, man-are-you-in-it-now voice, which didn’t exactly come as a surprise. Ellie had still hoped she wouldn’t hear it today. Or ever. Even more troubling than that, though, was how Noah had just implied Daniel would suffer from the consequences of her having botched the job as much as she would herself. Although she’d kept him anonymous in her report, she’d pretty much known it was a lost cause. OPUS already knew the two of them were friends. And even if OPUS hadn’t known that, they would have figured it all out. They always did. Eventually.

“Of course we knew it was Beck who helped you,” Noah said, as if reading her mind. “Who else would it be?” He sighed heavily. “I hate to break this to you, Ellie, but when it comes to being a field agent, you really suck.”

She closed her eyes. As if she needed him to tell her that. “I’ll clean out my desk immediately,” she said.

“Why would you do that?” he asked.

She opened her eyes again. “Because I suck as a spy.” Duh.

“I said you suck as a field agent,” he corrected her.

“The work you did on your report, on the other hand, was nothing short of amazing.”

“Wh-what?”

He gestured toward his desk, which was littered by papers, all fanned out for maximum consideration. He lifted his chin toward Daniel. “Beck tells me you put this together last night.”

She nodded. “Yeah. The report was due this morning.”

Noah eyed her thoughtfully. “You assessed all this information in one evening, saw all these patterns, made all these connections, drew all these conclusions…And then you wrote it up in a clear, concise, articulate report that reads like a dream? You did all that in one night?”

She nodded again. “Yeah…”

He stood, strode leisurely around to the front of his desk, then leaned back against it, still standing. His position should have made Ellie feel intimidated. But Noah didn’t seem threatening at all. On the contrary, he seemed to be…beaming at her? Oh, surely not.

“I made copies of your report this morning and sent it out to all pertinent parties in the organization,” he said.

“And a few more who weren’t pertinent but who I thought should know about it. All of us reviewed it at the same time, then conferred. And we are all of the opinion that never in the history of OPUS has anyone done a more thorough job or drawn more insightful conclusions, in even ten times the hours you put in on this.”