Uncommon Pleasure (24 page)

The team ran through the report from yesterday’s activity, adding notes detailing Richards’s sudden departure and trip to his house. Everyone signed the logs, then they divvied up the day’s surveillance shifts and duties.

“Stay alert,” Ty said, looking around the room and nailing each of the operatives with a glance. “Learn from my mistake. Never get distracted. Never let your guard down.”

Everyone’s spine straightened a little, and Sean covertly studied Ty out of the corner of his eye. Employees, team members, Marines, whatever you called them, they listened to Ty. There was just something about him. If he’d stayed in the Corps he would have made gunny for sure, maybe even gone through OCS and made the jump from enlisted to officer. Sean could see Langley Security’s leadership team coming together—John for the business side, the marketing and sales, the accounting, Ty for the personnel expertise. Between the two of them they could put together the strategy and tactics, if Ty made the commitment to the company.

Keeping Abby’s hectic schedule in mind, Sean took a later shift
that would follow one of the principal suspects through his evening routine. “You make that appointment?” he asked Ty as the group split up.

“Wednesday afternoon,” Ty said. “John’s going with me.”

“Good.”

Next he drove to Sears and picked up the right battery for Abby’s Celica, then drove to the campus. Online he’d found the location for microbiology classes and the nearest parking lot. Finding Abby’s car was simply a matter of driving up and down the rows until he found the little red car, parked in the corner of the lot, under a tree. A rectangle of faded paint sat dead center on the back bumper. What the hell had she done to the paint? Backed it into a sponge covered in paint thinner?

He had a case of socket wrenches in the back of his car. Three minutes with a clothes hanger and he had the driver’s door open and the hood popped. Fifteen minutes, total, and Abby had a new battery. He closed the hood, relocked the door, and drove home, where several boxes of books from an online retailer waited on the front steps. He carried them inside, opened all the boxes, and stacked the books on the coffee table according to subject.

Stack the immediate: industrial espionage research, specifically the pharmaceutical industry.

Stack the future: Virginia and Washington, D.C., guidebooks, Civil War histories, memoirs, and relevant public transportation maps. Quantico was home to the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, where he’d apply what he’d learned in combat to strategies for the future. He’d never lived there, and the possibilities in a two-hundred-mile radius for history and culture were nearly endless.

Stack the potent: love poetry. The Persian mystic Rumi, anthologies of history’s greatest love poems, and Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Glass of tea in hand, he took the most recent espionage book
and the sonnets to the back porch, and sat down to read until it was time to go to the business park. He was two hundred pages into the industrial espionage book and taking a break to wrestle with the structure of the sonnet when the side gate to the backyard opened, and Abby walked through it.

“Hey,” he exclaimed, surprised by her sudden appearance. He shoved the book of sonnets under the hardcover. “What are you doing here?”

“Returning your jumper cables,” she said, and held them out. He accepted them, watching her face, trying to make eye contact, but she transferred her attention to her purse. “How much do I owe you for the battery?”

“Excuse me?” he bluffed.

“You replaced my battery,” she said as she came up with a black leather checkbook cover, transferred it to her left hand, and began to dig through the shapeless brown bag again. “Unless someone else replaced it while I was in microbiology class. I took statistics last semester, so I can calculate the odds of some random stranger replacing my battery on the very day I discovered it was dying. The odds, if you’re interested, are vanishingly small. How did you get under the hood?”

“I broke into your car,” he said, giving up on all pretenses. She wore dark jeans that clung to her lean hips and legs, and what appeared to be three tank tops, layered over each other, in complementary shades of blue and green. It was the first time he’d seen her in broad daylight in over a year, and the sight made his heart skitter wildly in his chest. The shorter haircut left her neck and shoulders bare, and the sunlight filtering through the big maple trees dappled her freckled skin with fall gold.

She came up with a pen, opened the checkbook on the railing, and said, “That’s what I figured. How much do I owe you?”

He told her. “How did you know?”

“It started slowly when I left my house this morning, just like it did last night, but when I got in it after class, it started right up, like someone goosed it. Var
rooooom
,” she said as she tore the check out of her checkbook, then flipped to the register to make the notation. “Thank you.”

He accepted the check when she held it out, then folded it and put it in his wallet. “Abby, are you going to look at me once during this conversation?”

“I hadn’t planned on it,” she said, and turned to leave the way she came.

“Why not?”

She stopped, then hitched her bag higher on her shoulder. The movement caught the straps of all three tank top straps and pushed them up, revealing a plain white bra strap. The jeans, he noted distantly, hugged the heart-shaped curves of her ass in a very delicious way.

“I don’t need you to do things for me,” she said to the lilac bushes growing under the kitchen window. “I don’t need
anyone
to do things for me. I need to learn how to do them myself. Now I don’t have that chance.”

Semper Gumby.
“You’re right.” He waited a second. She didn’t turn around, but she didn’t leave, either. “Do you have time for me to show you how to replace your battery?”

“No,” she said, but she looked over her shoulder at him as she said it. “I’m so far behind on everything I’ll never catch up. But I still want you to show me.”

He followed her down the stairs to the stepping-stones that led through the garden gate, and reached past her to open the gate for her. At the slight contact between his chest and her shoulder she startled and looked up at him, but swept through and kept walking toward the street where her car was parked. She unlocked the car and popped the hood once again, paying close attention while he
gave her a crash course in battery replacement and tried not to be too obvious about how distracting the low-cut tank tops were when she leaned over the engine.

“Where did you get those?” she asked, pointing at the case of socket wrenches he’d pulled from the Mustang’s backseat.

“My house. Dad’s got a full workshop in the garage.”

“Maybe my dad has a set,” she mused.

“Most places won’t charge you too much to replace your battery, and then you’ll be sure it’s done right.” He peered through the windshield at the thick textbook on the passenger seat. “How late were you to microbiology?”

“An hour,” she said. “I’ll get notes from a friend.”

“And why are you taking microbiology?” he asked cautiously. The plan hinged on finding out who this new woman was.

“I couldn’t find a job,” she said bluntly. “Apparently majoring in liberal arts wasn’t a good choice in the worst economic downturn in nearly a century. I’m going back to school to get a nursing degree. I want to do a one-year intensive program, but I need to get the prereqs out of the way before I can apply.”

“Do you
want
to be a nurse?” he asked. The Abby he remembered loved books and movies, and had been the entertainment columnist for the college newspaper.

“I had fun in college, read all the great books,” she said. “Now I want to do meaningful work. After a few appointments with my dad I developed an interest in geriatric nursing.”

There was his in. “What’s wrong with your dad?”

She lifted her chin. “He has COPD. It’s a chronic, progressive lung disease. I’m taking care of him.”

All he knew about Abby’s father was that he was twice-divorced and almost completely uninvolved in his daughter’s life, despite the fact that she lived with him. “How’s he taking it?”

“He’s angry,” she said emotionlessly. “Angry because smoking
unfiltered cigarettes for forty-plus years finally caught up with him, and his mortality’s staring him in the face. Angry because he can’t do anything he used to do, like get dressed in less than twenty minutes, or go to work. Angry because the lawn looks terrible without him spending hours on it every weekend. Too stubborn to do anything that might make him feel better, like breathing exercises and taking a walk. And, I think, with two failed marriages and his sons barely speaking to him and a granddaughter he never sees, desperately afraid he’s going to die alone. Or maybe with just me for company.”

He stared at her. “Jesus, Abby,” he started.

“I have to go,” she said, and opened her car door. “I work at five.”

“You coming over tonight?”

The words were out before he could stop them, before he could think through voicing his eagerness, but New Abby was humming away at a speed that didn’t include falling in love any time soon. She looked at him, gave him the full force of those pale green eyes, the look pure challenge as she dismissively lifted one shoulder.

“Come over, Abby. I’ll make it worth your while,” he said.

“Better than sleep?” she asked, but the teasing lilt in her voice held an edge. “I am absolutely desperate for some sleep.”

A soft laugh huffed from him as he leaned over the car door. Her gaze dropped from his eyes to his mouth, then she licked and bit into her lower lip. He knew that signal, knew it well, knew the way to seduce Abby was her mouth. So he kissed her, the car door a grievous barrier between his body and hers as he urged her lips apart and rubbed his tongue against hers as nonchalantly as she’d shrugged off his invitation. Her jaw opened in hesitant stages, then she leaned a little closer…and he backed away.

“I’ll be fast,” he murmured. “Then you can sleep. If that’s what
you want. Or I’ll be slow. Whatever you want, Abby. Think about it. Let me know when you come over.”

*   *   *

The knock on the front door came at two twenty. Sean pulled on
a pair of boxer shorts just in case it was some drunk friend of Camilla’s who didn’t know she was out of town. Just in case it wasn’t, he palmed a condom on his way down the hall.

It was Abby. He opened the door, and she ducked under his arm. “You have to set your alarm for five,” she said. “I can’t be late for class again.”

“Fast or slow?”

“What? It just has to go off. I don’t care how the thing buzzes, but it better be loud because—”

He kissed her, the old-fashioned, movie kind of kiss, both hands to her jaw to hold her mouth for his, but mostly to shut her up. “Fast or slow,” he repeated, trusting he’d made the context clear with the explicit, hard kiss.

Her purse landed on the floor with a thud. “Fast. Now.”

Giving her another rough kiss, he backed her to the sofa then spun her around, his touch demanding, careless. She dropped to her knees on the cushions with her forearms braced on the sofa’s back, and he knelt behind her as he shoved her skirt up, tugged her panties down, and tortured himself with a couple of skin-to-skin thrusts against her ass. When he had the condom on he snugged up behind her and reached around to part her folds in search of her clit.

And found her slick, swollen, beyond ready for him, a lightning-quick assessment confirmed when his cock slid into her pussy with a mind-searing ease. “Abby. Fuck.”

She tilted her hips back and looked over her shoulder at him. “You told me to think about it. So I did.” He pulled out and drove back in, forcing a gasp from her throat. “All night. You know what
No Limits is like. Sex everywhere. I watched couples grind on the dance floor—oh God—and thought about you.”

She stopped talking as he stroked in, paused, pulled out. Her head dropped forward, and her breath caught. The skin of her ass pressed soft and hot against his lower abdomen. She was slick enough for him to hear his cock stroke through her moisture with each gripping stroke, and she smelled of sweat and desire. Sensory overload. All circuits shut down.

It took no time at all. He braced his forearm next to hers on the back of the sofa, touched the tip of his finger to her swollen clit, set a ruthless pace. Pure animal movement did the rest. She tightened around him, ass and thighs tensing as she hurtled into orgasm with an anguished cry. His breath forced through clenched teeth as he jetted into her.

With a relieved, satisfied little sigh she nuzzled her cheek into her folded arms. He dealt with the condom as quickly as he could, but when he came back to the sofa she’d slipped down into a sleeping ball of Abby. He swept her up in his arms to carry her to the bedroom, but misjudged the width of the hallway and bumped her head on the corner.

“Ow,” she muttered, but she didn’t really wake.

So much for Prince Charming. He turned sideways to walk down the hall and set her down on the bed. She rolled over and tucked her hands under her chin, not even waking as he covered her up.

This wasn’t going to work. At her pace of life he’d need a year to get her back. He lay awake for a long time, strategizing, before sleep claimed him, too.

*   *   *

“Thirteen more minutes.” The clock read 2:47 p.m. Abby rubbed
her gritty eyes and bargained with her tired brain. “Thirteen more minutes and then you can take a nap.”

Her body was no longer stupid enough to fall for blatant lies. She had another fifty pages of reading for her Ethics class tomorrow, a short paper to write in response to the reading, and an entire chapter of Microbiology to outline. She really should schedule another session in the lab to review the previous week’s work. At least this semester she only had one science-intensive course. The semester she’d done anatomy and physiology
and
statistics, she’d been terrified she’d flunk out of school and into a job at McDonalds.

“Twelve minutes,” she muttered. She blinked hard, then read the same sentence about the history of relational ethics twice, understanding only the conjunctions before the text blurred together on the page. She groaned, closed her eyes, and rested the heels of her hands in her eye sockets.