Packing Heat (13 page)

Fantasies were off-limits, too, especially when they were backed up with enough firsthand knowledge to make them sizzle but not enough to stop the ache. It didn’t help that she was buying him underwear. Boxer briefs. Which meant she had to guess at his size, except there wasn’t a whole lot of guessing involved because she’d seen him in his boxer briefs, in just about every state possible for a man, from couldn’t-careless to oh-my-god.

She tried to concentrate on his face, which was too rugged for her taste, not to mention his expression was almost always some form of barely disguised tolerance. Except when his eyes went all bedroom, smoldering from under half-closed lids. And there was his mouth, and no matter how she tried to focus on the snarky comments that usually came out of it, he’d kissed her with that mouth, and it had been a hell of a kiss because he put his whole body into it. Which led to her wondering what else he could do with that mouth and that body, and that led to her trying to find a loophole in her ground rules.

It would ease the contention between them if they slept together, she told herself. He’d stop being so touchy, and she’d be able to concentrate on Richard. Sex was the elephant in the room. Once they’d slept together, it would be out in the open and out of their systems, the elephant banished. And she’d be an idiot if she believed that. For her, having sex with Cole would send the elephant on its way. Maybe. But the elephant would still be there for Cole, and it would have a big blue
V
tattooed on its side. Her capitulation would be like putting him on a mammoth dose of Viagra. As things stood now, he was at half simmer most of the time. If she jumped in the sack with him, he wouldn’t let her out for a week.

Not that she thought for one minute she was the great love of his life, or even to his taste, as women went. In fact, he’d made it more than clear that under normal circumstances she wouldn’t be the kind of woman he preferred. But the man had been in jail for eight years, and she was the only game in town.

Except it wasn’t a game. She had a phone date later that evening with Richard’s kidnappers to remind her of that.

She put all but the immediate necessities out of her mind while she visited a moderately priced chain store and an Italian restaurant before heading back to the Hurry Inn. She expected Cole to gripe about his empty stomach, but he didn’t mention the hours of absence, just thanked her for the clean clothes and dug into his dinner. He didn’t lift his head until his food was gone, and even then he focused his attention on her take-out box.

“You going to finish that?” he said.

Harmony met Cole’s eyes, but he was keeping his feelings to himself, like usual. She slid her chicken Caesar salad across the table. “Be my guest,” she said, taking to her feet.

No point in putting off the inevitable, and she wasn’t calling the kidnappers while she was sitting across the table from Cole. He didn’t have a lot of respect for her or her abilities; letting him see how much these calls tore her up would hardly help his opinion.

She dialed the number on her regular cell, and the call was picked up on the first ring.

The same man answered, with the same Russian-accented arrogance. “Who is the man with you?”

“There’s no man with me,” she said. “Let me speak to Richard.”

“I tell you before, you don’t make demands.”

“And I told you before, I talk to Richard or the deal is off.”

There was nothing from the other end of the call, and for one sick second she thought they’d called her bluff. Then Richard came on the line. “Harmony?” he asked, sounding weaker, but not like he was in pain.

“Hello,” she said, turning to the window and blinking furiously, swallowing to keep the tears out of her voice. “How are you holding up?”

“Not very well,” he said, his voice going hoarse before he cleared his throat. “You’re doing what they want, right?”

“Richard—”

“Just do what they tell you to, Harmony.”

“But—”

“I know you won’t respect me for begging, but you can’t imagine . . .” His voice dropped. “What they’ve done to me so far is nothing. They have all these knives and torches . . . Don’t be a hero, Harmony, just get them the money, and they’ll let me go.”

“Do you really believe that, Richard?”

“That is a dangerous question, Agent Swift,” the Russian said. In the background there was a hoarse scream. “Your friend suffers because you do not follow instructions.”

“Stop hurting him or I swear it’s all over.” She put as much steel into her voice as she could with Richard sobbing at the other end of the line. She pulled it off because she had nothing to lose. No matter what Richard believed out of desperation, the Russians wouldn’t let him go if they got the money. But he wasn’t going to stay alive long enough for her to rescue him if they kept up the torture.

“I will not be threatened by a woman,” the kidnapper snapped.

“It’s not a threat.”

“So far you have accomplished nothing. Perhaps I should simply kill him.”

“No, I have made progress.” She flew across the room, waving a hand at Cole. That and the panic that must have been in her eyes had him tapping the keys.

“I opened an offshore account,” she said to the kidnapper, giving him the account number that popped up on the screen. “There’s no money in it yet, but I’m getting closer to breaking the FBI’s banking system.”

“This is a disappointment. You have twenty-four hours to demonstrate your ability to meet our demands. If you cannot, we send body part.”

“What did you do, read the
Kidnapper’s Handbook?
Chapter Four: Chop Off a Finger.”

“What is this
Kidnapper’s Handbook
?”

“I mean you have no imagination.”

“We need none, Agent Swift. Just very sharp knives and earplugs. And it will not be a finger.”

Her hands were shaking, too, and she paced the room with a restlessness that told him she was trying to outrun her own thoughts, not make sense of them.

“We have to get some money in that account,” she said. “If we don’t they said they’d start chopping off body parts.”

“You’re right, they don’t have any imagination.”

“I know you haven’t had much luck breaking the FBI’s system. If you’re worried about getting traced, maybe we could steal the money from somewhere else.”

Cole stepped into her path and caught her by the shoulders. He shook her, hard enough to have her head snapping back. Her eyes focused on him, and she seemed a little confused.

“Listen to yourself, Harm. You’re talking about stealing money from innocent people. Would Richard want you to do that?”

She dropped her eyes, still trembling but coming back to herself. “He was begging.”

“I’m sorry, but you aren’t going to drain random bank accounts.”

“There are some people out there who wouldn’t miss a few million dollars. Movie stars, oil companies, the Russian mafia. That would be poetic justice.”

Yeah, poetic justice,
Cole thought. And he needed another big-time enemy like he needed another hole in the head. “So the kidnappers win, right?”

“What?”

“You’re talking about paying them. One phone call—”

“Two. And you didn’t hear him—”

“You’re right, and I’m sure he was suffering, but that means he was alive. We both know the minute you pay the ransom he’s dead.”

Harmony took a deep breath, nodded once.

“Then we stick with the original plan. The whole point of raiding the frozen accounts is that the theft won’t be noticed right away. It buys you enough time to find Richard and get him out. We just have to be careful. We can’t help him if we’re caught.”

She met his eyes again, and then she stepped forward, lifting her face to his, her eyes fluttering closed. Cole took a step back. Clearly it surprised her as much as it did him.

“I thought—”

“If you were thinking, you wouldn’t have—”

“You’re right.” She went to the window, looking between the edges of the drapes without opening them. Night was falling, and the window looked out over the parking lot, so there wasn’t a lot to see.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” Cole asked her out of the blue.

“No. Do you?” She turned to face him, but she stayed on the other side of the room.

“I had a few offers.”

Harmony gave a slight laugh. “So did I, and they were probably the same kind you got.” She leaned back against the wall between the window and door. “Dating in Washington, D.C., is like a social prize fight. Only the most ambitious men go to work there, and they approach finding a wife like it’s a political campaign. It’s all about the win, and marriage is less about romance than it is about finding a lifelong campaign contributor—and I don’t mean money, that’s easy to come by. Who you know is who you are.

“I’m not connected, so unless I call myself Iowa and assign myself some electoral votes, I’ll never be more than one-night stand material.”

“Politicians are stupid.”

She waved that off. “It’s not like I want to get married. But it would be nice to have a relationship that lasts longer than the salad, which is generally when my date discovers I don’t do casual sex and reads the latest of the text messages he incessantly gets. The next thing I know there’s some emergency on Capitol Hill, and democracy as we know it will be in great danger unless my date races to the rescue. And I get stuck with the check.”

“Great leftovers,” Cole said.

“It’s still dinner for one. And that was more information than you wanted.”

“I was trying to get your mind off the phone call.”

She pushed away from the wall and crossed the room, stopping in front of him. “There are better distractions.”

This time she didn’t kiss him. And just in case he didn’t get her meaning, she lifted his hand and sucked his thumb into her mouth, lapping her tongue across his skin and giving it a little nip before she slid her mouth away. She kept her eyes on his the entire time.

“Tell me to stop,” she said.

“You’re joking, right?”

“We both know this is a mistake. If we do this, it’s going to complicate everything.”

“Yep.” And he could see the war raging in her. She was right about sex complicating everything, but wild horses, driven expertly by Roman charioteers, couldn’t have dragged him away from her again. He framed her face, threading his fingers back into the wealth of her blond hair, and kissed her. He felt her surrender, knew the second when she abandoned the high moral ground, ceding what was smart for what she wanted. And what she wanted, thank god, was him.

Her body went soft against his, burning him up in all the places they were touching, moving restlessly as he dropped his mouth to her neck, down the vee of her top to tease along the inner curves of her breasts. Her head dropped back. She moaned softly, and the breathless, pleading sound slammed through him, shooting heat and need to his groin until he was so painfully hard it was all he could do not to throw her down and take.

It helped that she gave, or rather demanded, saying, “Now,” as she stepped back and flipped the button at the back of her halter. She did a little shimmy with her shoulders, and as the dress whispered down her body, she slid her fingers beneath the top of her bikini panties and slid them off with a wriggle of her hips.

Cole had his shirt off before her clothing hit the floor. He shucked his pants, too, then retrieved them, grabbing something out of his back pocket before he dropped them again.

Harmony looked at the condom in his hand, one eyebrow inching up.

“I believe in always being prepared,” he said.

“I don’t think the Boy Scouts have a badge for this.”

“There’s one too many badges around here already.”

For a minute he thought he’d said the wrong thing, and then she was in his arms and they were on the bed, her mouth on his, her hands rushing over his skin.

She tried to push him onto his back. He wouldn’t go. She got to be in charge everywhere else, he’d be damned if he let her tell him what to do in bed.

He rose over her, his mouth on her breast, working a hard nipple between tongue and teeth. She arched up, every tug drawing a shudder or moan from her, and when he slipped his hand between her thighs, slipped two fingers inside her, she came, hands fisted in the bedclothes, her body convulsing around his fingers, once twice, as she sighed his name. He fumbled on the condom, lifted her knees, slid his hands under her backside, and entered her before the last echo of her orgasm, feeling the fading ripple of it as she sheathed him in heat.

Her eyes opened and met his, still dazed with pleasure, her mouth curving up as she ran her palms up her belly, over her breasts, keeping her eyes on his as she began to move, meeting him stroke for stroke. There was only her, the hunger and frustration of the last eight years and the previous three days building and building, all but blinding him so he could only feel, the heat and friction of her body around his, her hands skimming along his skin, the way her body was tightening around his.

Her breath rushed out on the little moan that seemed to be a trigger for him. He lifted her higher, drove into her one last time, locking himself there as her body pulsed and shuddered, and his skin felt so tight he was afraid he’d explode. And then he did, the dam inside him burst, all the pressure and heat and pleasure from a million nerve endings rushing down from his head and up from his toes, focusing into the climax, making it so intense he felt incandescent with it, years of darkness turned to light. He held onto it as long as he could, held onto her, until all his strength was drained away and he collapsed next to her and just concentrated on breathing for a few minutes.

The bed shook, and he cracked open an eye to find Harmony leaning up on one elbow next to him, still a little out of breath, her skin sheened with sweat and her mouth curved up in pleasure.

In a lifetime of fantasies he could never have imagined this moment. Or her.

“That did the job,” she said, and he knew the moment was over. Her mind was back on the case, and the phone call.

“I feel so used,” he said with sarcasm he didn’t come close to feeling because that was the problem he’d had before, he realized. It wasn’t about her making the first move; it was her motivation that bothered him. He didn’t make an effort to figure out why.
Why
was dangerous territory for a man whose future was so uncertain.

“I think we used each other,” she said. “It was inevitable that we’d get horizontal together at some point, given our mutual attraction. And I wasn’t the one with the condom,” she pointed out.

“Juan asked me if I needed anything,” Cole said with a shrug.

“And that was your first thought?”

“I was in jail for eight years. My first thought is always about sex.”

“Now who’s feeling used?” She started to get up.

Cole put his hand on her stomach and she stopped, meeting his eyes. “It doesn’t have to get in the way,” he said.

“It won’t.”