The Risqué Target (3 page)

“Any time,” the husky drawl said, dripping with delicious attraction.

Shaking her head, she readjusted her backpack, gave him one last look, and started to walk away with whatever control she had left.

Don’t look back
.

“Hey!” he called after her. “Next time, you should tell your boyfriend to meet you at the airport.”

When she didn’t answer, she heard him taunt her again. “You do have a boyfriend, don’t you?”

She glanced over her shoulder at the delicious man with the wicked and talented mouth. “Yep, one in every major city, and Boston is currently covered.” She turned and waved him off, kicking up the sway in her hips, secretly hoping he was watching her ass as she walked away.

****

Nala pushed the café door open, spotted the camera, and sent a text:
Last camera… is it out?

Her phone vibrated, and she checked the inbox:
Yes, you're all clear to go, and call me when you're through. You're in big trouble, chickie!

She already knew what Gidget was going to be bitching about. The hold-up at the café. Nala couldn’t exactly cause a scene, although it would have been easy to flip her stalker onto his back, kick him in the crotch, or even crack him in the jaw. A nice sleeper hold came to mind on the airplane, but she had to be civilized around other people. Her training wasn’t meant to be used on them. It was for the bad guys, the corrupt people of the world. So, she had to find another way to get rid of him.

Kissing the guy was just an added bonus, one she had to drop in the garbage can, which was twenty feet away. She'd be there in five seconds, dump her disposable phone, and call Gidget on her secure line.

Once she’d made it safely past the airport surveillance camera, she cracked the phone against the can, wiped the electrical components clean with her scanner, and trashed it. She tried to toss the memory of the kiss and the guy from the coffee shop into the can as well, but it popped back out at her. She decided to keep it a bit longer.

The breezeway doors to the airport opened with a
swoosh
. There should have been only one man on her mind—the one who haunted her dreams, the man she could see herself killing with her bare hands. He was the cold-blooded killer she planned on bringing down, taking in, or—given the opportunity—defensively shooting. Nala wasn’t a killer, but under the right circumstances, he was one she could easily pull the trigger on and still get a good night's sleep afterwards.

Her hatred for him stemmed from the fact that he was the man who'd killed her partner, Gabe, three years earlier. In fact, that was her only reason for being in Boston. The problem was, she had no face to go with the name. All she knew was that the man she was looking for, the one she so desperately wanted to feed a bullet to, was a man by the name of Tantum Maddox.

Hailing the cab had taken Nala longer than anticipated. She wasn’t giving it up. As it idled outside the overpriced boutique shop, she chose a dress for the evening’s event, something that would get her noticed.

The Gallor Device and Networking Company had sent her an invite for the presentation of their latest spyware gadget. Normally, she tossed out such mailings unread, but bored and between assignments, she’d gone onto the Web to check it out. That's when she saw it, the guest list for the event. One name had jumped out at her. Tantum Maddox.

The cab pulled up to the luxury XV Beacon Hotel. She got out, still wearing the t-shirt, sneakers and ripped jeans she’d torn in the pursuit of Tiffany Stark's boyfriend.  One of them. Tiffany, daughter of Texas governor Austin Stark, had many boyfriends. When Nala found yet another kid lurking outside Tiffany's room in the middle of the night, she ran him off the grounds. Clearing a fence he’d jumped, her knee got snagged on a metal wire. Was she ever glad that assignment was over. Tiffany was a spoiled bitch.

Nala checked in at the front desk and winced as her eyes took in the lavish foyer. She headed for the elevators with her backpack slung over her shoulder, the garment bag containing her overpriced dress in one hand, and another bag with a pair of three-inch heels slung over her forearm. Out of place and underdressed, she got into the elevator alone with a sigh. Strategically placed mirrors, which seemed to be everywhere, reminded her of her inappropriate appearance.

Once inside her room, she exhaled and threw her bags on the huge four-poster bed. At least she'd get a good night sleep. She could toss and turn and still have room, with no worry about falling off the bed. That happened sometimes.

She glanced at her phone, checking the time. The convention had started an hour ago, and she wasn’t going to make it. She figured she had roughly an hour and a half to get ready for the cocktails afterwards.
Shit, why didn’t I get an earlier flight? Because my damn boss held me up at the office while I was signing off for a couple of days, that's why.

She showered and applied her make-up. She hated wearing foundation, but the light freckles spanning her nose to her cheeks needed to be concealed. She applied a sophisticated shade to her pale pink lips. Last, she carefully lined her eyes, enhancing their pale blue hue.

She slipped into the dress the saleswoman had picked out for her. “Your perky B-cups will hold the fabric nicely but still sway enough to catch the attention of any gentleman you might desire,” she’d said in some indeterminable accent. Nala had shaken her head, but now, standing in front of the mirror, she saw that the woman knew what she was talking about. The dress had a low-cut narrow V-neck, open practically to her belly button, but her so-called “perky” breasts did stay put. The back scooped even lower, almost to the dimples above her ass. The material was thin, flowing and flirty. She pulled a G-string from her backpack, wiggled it up over her hips, and slipped her feet into her heels. She had done her hair up, but it was becoming painful, so she decided to let it down.

Her phone vibrated and she crossed the room to the mahogany desk where it lay. “Damn!” she cursed as her legs tried to adjust to the high-heels. She snapped the phone open.

“Listen, chickie.” Gidget's words came quick so as not to be interrupted. “I don’t want to hear about the cost of the room. You're officially on assignment, so it's covered. I'll send your instructions later. Your gun should be delivered in a few minutes. And by the way, what the hell happened at the airport?”

“Not important.” She wasn’t about to tell Gidget about the man and his kiss.

“I was freakin’ out. I thought whoever was tracking you had gotcha.”

“Have you found out who it was yet?” Nala asked.

Gidget tipped her off that someone on the airplane had been inquiring about her whereabouts and had viewed her travel arrangements at NESA, National Elite Security Agency. “I traced a string of numbers and came to a dead end. But I have good news. I found a Tantum Maddox born in Palm Springs, California on February 12, 1975. There's not much on him, just a couple of sealed records starting from 1990 when he was a kid. A couple more turned up after he was eighteen, but I can't access them either. Since 1996, nothing,
nada
. The guy just disappeared. I checked his Social Security, and either he hasn’t worked a day in his life, or he hasn’t paid any taxes.”

Nala's heart raced. “Did you find any pictures of him?”

“I looked into the DMV records for some kind of photo ID, but it seems his license was revoked when he was twenty-one, so there’s no picture ID in the system. I even checked his high school yearbooks, but it appears he was conveniently absent on every picture day.”

“Shit!”

“Yeah, that’s about what I said. Sorry, Chickie. So are you ready to go see what you can find out at the party?”

“I was just about to leave.” A knock came at the door. “I'll call you back in a bit,” she told Gidget. “I think my delivery is here.” She snapped the phone shut.

****

Tantum Maddox was a sucker for new technology, something left over from when he was a kid. His father always made sure he had a new and updated model of everything. Unfortunately, that had left him with a strong need to acquire only the best of everything, a characteristic he couldn’t shake as an adult.

He got a hard-on when a convention came around to introduce an innovative product or some type of new invention, and after being in Mexico for the past few years, he was overdue for one. A convention, not a hard-on. Those, though rare these days, were usually taken care of on the spot. He was already in Boston in pursuit of his target, so taking a look at Gallor’s newest device would be a real treat, he’d thought. But he was as disappointed in the presentation as he'd been at the airport a few hours earlier, when his target got the slip on him.

Tantum normally didn’t attend convention parties, but he was irritated and in need of a good stiff drink. Jack Daniels straight would calm his temper, though what he could really use was another shot of the woman who'd surprised the fuck out of him at the airport with that hug and etched-in-the mind kiss. Where the hell did she come from? After his inspection to make sure she wasn’t packing, he had enjoyed his bit of fun with the stranger. But her entrance was as abrupt as her exit. It left him thinking about her still, hours later. Though he rarely went for seconds with any woman, he hadn’t gotten to finish his first helping with her, and that left him starving for more.

He leaned against the bar and tossed back the hard whiskey in an attempt to knock the woman from his sober mind. The liquor slid down his throat, smooth but with a burning kick. He loosened his strangling tie. Suits, fuck, he hated wearing them, even though he'd been told more than a dozen times he looked hot in the constrictive get-up. He'd been told he looked hot in absolutely nothing too. He blamed his discomfort with suits on the fact that he'd been kickin’ it with the cartels, no suits required. Shit, for them, clean t-shirts and Levi's were formal wear.

The room was filled with tech geeks, agents, mostly men. He recognized a few agents from prominent security agencies. Most identified him as Marcus Richards. Only a handful of people knew him by his given name. Even NESA referred to him as Marcus Richards. But there were a few people in high places within the agency aware of his true identity. After all, his father couldn’t pay everyone off.

Bucky, his AC and go-to guy, knew him as Tantum. They'd been working together for over ten years. Good old Buck held a chest full of his secrets. Tantum hadn’t meant to jump down his throat with that question about being his target's AC, too, but when he couldn’t catch a break about the nameless target’s identity, he got frustrated. Yet, what if it was true? If his target was an insider, might Bucky actually be his AC? An unlikely coincidence, but it would explain why Tantum couldn't find him.

The target was either extremely good at covering his tracks, or Tantum was going at the investigation the wrong way. With every step forward, he was knocked back on his ass, and he wasn't used to that. It was time to switch things up, but he had no idea how. And that frustrated him all the more.

He knocked back another swig of the harsh whiskey, glanced around the room, and paused, a rush of heated blood pumping to the tip of his cock.

Classy high heels lifted a pair of long, slender legs until they were lost beneath the hem of a slinky dress. Above them was a near-perfect ass, not quite bubbly, but definitely prominent enough to offer a slight jiggle while being screwed from behind. His cock gave a jolt from the image that came to his mind. The dress scooped low, revealing a delicate, but muscle-toned, back. For the first time in—he didn’t know how long, he was turned on from the mere sight of the backside of a female. It usually took a lot more than that to start a party in his pants.

Tempted to go to her, he remained on the barstool. He was used to women coming on to him, not the other way ’round.

When he was twenty-six, he realized he had a lot to offer and that women didn’t want him only because of his father's money. He had Lucinda Reynolds to thank for that. A commanding officer in a camp he attended prior to entering NESA, she showed him how to please a woman and, in more ways than one, pulled him out of his secluded shell. First Lucinda blew apart his notion that women were only meant for pumping himself into. Then she educated him about the female body, all the secret places most men didn’t know about or, worse, didn’t bother with.

Young and overwhelmed by the great sex, he’d confessed to Lucinda that he cared for her. She crushed him. She explained he meant nothing to her beyond an assignment she was being paid to handle. It seemed that when NESA profiled Tantum, he lacked confidence in one area—his appearance and how he could use it to his advantage. Lucinda had done her job well. Tantum learned how effective sex appeal could be. He learned to use his looks like the gun he carried. His body was a weapon, and he used it to obtain whatever was required.