Virtually His (25 page)

The sound of the door opening interrupted her wildly careening thoughts. The light came on. Releasing her lips, Armando lifted his head.

“Ah, I wondered how long it’d take before you decided enough was enough,” he said mildly. Helen peered dazedly around Armando. Jed—Number Nine—stood at the doorway. She put a hand to her back and pulled her shirt down. That man seemed bent on appearing when she wasn’t looking her best.

“What are you doing, Armando?” Jed asked quietly.

Armando’s hands dropped to his sides. “Pretending to be the Prince of Darkness,” he glibly replied. “Showing Agent Roston here a thing or two. Making you appear. I’ve been very busy, as you can tell.”

“Don’t you have somewhere to go, Agent Roston?” Jed asked politely. “I need to talk to Armando privately.”

She would have stayed if she hadn’t felt that any moment now she would lose control of her legs and she would end up in a pile at this man’s feet again. That was all she needed.

“I was just going,” she informed him and disentangled herself from Armando. Limping past, she couldn’t resist bringing up the same subject from their last meeting. “Want to time me to my next destination?”

Jed’s silver gaze stabbed hers. “It’s easy to find you,” he said, looking back at Armando, who had flopped down lazily onto one of the seats, “when you’re so easily distracted.”

Ouch. Hell glanced back. Armando smiled and shrugged. Had he really been trying to distract her? From what? She looked back at Jed. Or whom? At the moment, she was too muddled to try to figure this out. She had better go before she decided to do what was an inexplicable temptation at the moment. She wanted to walk over to Jed and mess up that perfectly combed hair and twist that errant lock across his forehead around her finger. She had to clench her hand to stop herself.

“Still distracted, aren’t you?”

Helen blinked. “About what?”

“How long has it been since you slept, Miss Roston?” Jed asked softly. “Forty-eight, fifty-some hours? Your mind is showing signs of exhaustion and your body is catching up. I suggest you return to your quarters and get Dr. Kirkland to help you to get ready for bed, like a good little girl.”

“Oh, she’s ready to go to bed,” Armando said.

Helen ignored Armando’s chuckle. “The operation is finished and I can do what I like,” she told him. Good little girl? Who did he think he was? Had it really been that long since she had slept?

“Then do it, so the rest of us can finish our jobs.”

She stared defiantly at those silver eyes. “I’m sorry you weren’t able to apprehend both the targets. I’ll help you find the missing man.”

“I don’t need you to do my job. And now, if you’ll excuse us?” He addressed Armando, “You didn’t interrupt Number Eight like you were cued to do.”

“I was…distracted. Can you send me to bed now, too?” Armando asked, amusement in his voice.

Jed turned and looked pointedly at Helen. Okay, she got the message. This was man-to-man private. She left the room and closed the door, wondering why she felt so prickly toward this one commando. After all, he’d shown up at the right time twice already. Both times, it seemed, she’d delayed his royal highness from some important task.

She shouldn’t have mentioned about having finished her mission. After all, that gave him the opening to remind her that he still had his to do, and she was partially to blame for that. Okay, more than partially. If she hadn’t made him lose time going back down the elevator, he could have had both the Cummings in custody by now.

Instead, only the woman was caught and now they had to interrogate her to find out where her husband could be hiding. A whole lot of work lay ahead for other people and it made Helen feel bad that she was to blame.

She had to get these overwhelming sensations under control somehow before she got back to work. Sleep. She knew she would just be lying in bed if she went to her quarters. The idea of having Dr. Kirkland and staff touching her right now made her want to puke. No, she had to tire herself out, get her mind off sex, then head to the CAVE. Armando said he tricked his mind into believing he was back in balance. She had to find out how he did it.

First…she thought of it a moment, then nodded. Yeah, she would go swimming. A couple of long and slow laps alone would take the edge off. Maybe she would sit in the hot tub for a few minutes and relax. Her injured leg would probably thank her for it.

The silent vibration of her cell phone interrupted her thoughts. She checked her message. Dr. Kirkland wanted to know whether she was okay and to make sure she got to bed soon.

Helen smiled. She hadn’t had so many men wanting her in bed in a while. Her smile disappeared. Wasn’t that the reason for her current dilemma? According to Armando, her body was overcompensating. All last year, she’d ignored her emotional and physical needs while in training. She had a healthy sex drive normally but she hadn’t…She frowned. When was the last time…? She sighed. Pathetic. She could just imagine Dr. Kirkland’s face if she text-messaged him: Supersoldier-spy needs sex for food.

H
e put down his dictionary. He’d forgotten one thing about dangerous women. They hated not being in control. And when they felt their control being threatened, they tended to be extremely obstinate. Their independence both irritated and amused him. It also had the perverse effect of turning him on.

Sleep-deprived. Nursing a leg injury. One could say Elena Rostova had had a pretty active day, from elevator-surfing, to hand-to-hand combat, to running down twelve flights of steps, to being chased by several unknown assailants and being shot with a tranquilizer.

Most of the operatives from the mission were already asleep or relaxing somewhere. None of them had had the same strenuous two days she had had. And what was she doing? She was going to take a swim.

She was being extremely obstinate about something. The look of defiance on her face told him that she suspected that he would be watching her sooner or later. Of course he would, especially once he’d checked her sleeping quarters and found no one there.

He’d wondered how long the serum would stay in her system. In his opinion, a little too long. She should be in bed, exhausted. But there she was, larger than life on the screen, peeling off her clothes carelessly. His eyes narrowed slightly as he caught the brief wince of pain crossing her face as she pulled her pants off.

She was starting to come down. He buzzed Dr. Kirkland’s line.

“Has she called you yet?” he asked.

“No, but I just text-messaged her and she sent back that she’d just taken the painkillers but was feeling fine.”

“Does she even know what time of day it is?”

“I don’t think her body will care, especially if she continues to fight sleep.”

“She has a high tolerance for pain, then,” he remarked, returning his attention to Helen. “When you talked to her, was she emotionally stable?”

“Yes, normal. Why?”

“She wasn’t acting sensitive to light?”

“No, nothing similar to Armando’s symptoms at all. Not yet, anyway.”

“I’ll call you back, Doc. Get some rest. Some of us should.”

He leaned back and sipped on his drink as he watched the screen thoughtfully. She obviously didn’t want to return to her quarters. Why? Was it because she didn’t want Dr. Kirkland to examine her? But she wasn’t hiding the pain, so what was it she didn’t want Dr. Kirkland to know?

Her body gleamed in the soft light reflected by the pool. She didn’t dive in, like she usually did, but sat at the tiled edge and draped her long legs over the shallow end. He watched the water slowly covering her body as she lowered herself in, lapping up her thighs, hips, narrow waist, to just below her breasts. Her eyes were closed as she stood there, not moving deeper.

He waited, his eyes feasting on her naked breasts, so white against the dark water. She was beautiful, like a water nymph, and he didn’t bother to curb the desire rising hard in him. She slowly sank deeper and her long sigh sounded lush, sensuous, even through the speakers, reaching out in a secret caress. He took another sip of water. Elena Rostova might not know who he was, but she knew how to get to him.

He should be irritated. The initial plan was to let her rest, with him sleeping the same hours, letting their brain waves get in sync, and waking her up very early tomorrow and getting in another VR session. She would be rested but not a hundred percent, and still edgy from the serum in her system. The second time would be tougher because she would be prepared, so he had to initiate the attack while she was still tired. He would push her until she gave in.

He needed sleep himself. But he couldn’t till she went to bed, too, not if he wanted to prepare for the next VR session.

She sighed again, a catlike purr that had nothing to do with exhaustion. His eyes narrowed slightly as he studied her. She sounded like a woman being pleasured. She wasn’t swimming, just bobbing up and down in the water. Every time she pushed off the floor of the pool, her breasts teased him, wet and perky, and then they would disappear as her weight brought her back underwater, and she repeated this with her eyes closed, as if that were the most pleasurable thing to do.

His attention was riveted to her face, her sighs, her tantalizing breasts. She had never done this before. The sight made him want to join her in the pool. Naked. With her back against the wall, so he could push inside her hard. With her purrs against his ear as he molded those soft breasts in his hands.

As if she saw his fantasy in her mind, her hands reached up and massaged her nipples. Her low hum of pleasure zapped like an electric rod through him. The woman wasn’t sleepy. Or tired. She was turned on.

She began swimming leisurely. Back and forth. Breaststroke, then backstroke, then breaststroke again. After the third lap, she suddenly stopped. She slapped the water hard with the palm of her hand.

“Dammit, dammit!” she murmured. “I’m too tired to swim any faster.”

He cocked his head. Why was she avoiding sleep then? He watched as she pulled herself out of the pool and without picking up the towel nearby, she walked over to the hot tub.

“Very hot water,” she said as she slipped in slowly, like she was in some pain with that leg.

She turned on the jets. She propped the injured leg against the jet and groaned.

Ah, that felt good to her. Her body was coming back to normal and she was, for some reason, fighting it and yet enjoying it at the same time. He had to get her alone so he could find out why for himself.

It wasn’t going away. She could feel exhaustion knocking at her consciousness, and still she couldn’t relax.

She must be going nuts. She was fantasizing about a virtual reality man. He wasn’t real, girl. Stop thinking about him. But it was tough not to in her strangely sensitized state. Every small sensation ran across her skin like a rush of heat and air. Every movement made her squirm, left her a little breathless.

It reminded her too much of how she felt when Hades had touched her during the RV session. The more she thought of it, the more her gut tightened, as if her mind was deliberately feeding off her own feelings.

Her reaction to Armando’s kiss had frightened her a little. That strange heat had charged through her system, overwhelmed her with a need for…

She shook her head. For sex? She shook her head again. She didn’t want Armando, not in her head. His kiss and touch had somehow evoked the same intense desire she’d felt with Hades. But that was Hades manipulating her with pleasure. So what was manipulating her now?

Helen sighed. She couldn’t even explain it to herself, so how was she going to do that with Dr. Kirkland? This Jacuzzi was perfect—she didn’t have to move too much, and that racing currentlike feeling inside her had slowed down to a manageable crawl.

She could sleep here. And wake up a prune.

The jet of water hitting the side of her calf felt wonderful, in a pleasure-pain sort of way. The whirling hot water was a different kind of pleasure—slow and lulling, giving her body a gentle all-over massage. But it wasn’t enough. She was still edgy inside. She knew the moment she stopped the whirlpool, that sensation would return.

“Mind if I join you?” A voice mixed in with the noise from the hot tub jets.

Helen opened her eyes. It was Heath, in swimming trunks. Didn’t these commandos go to sleep? And why did they all have to look so damn good? In her current state, that was so not helping.

She shrugged. What could she say? Go away, I don’t want anyone near me? Besides, the guy had saved her life today. Or yesterday. She frowned; she couldn’t tell anymore.

Heath lowered himself into the tub. “Usually this place is empty when I come here,” he said.

“I don’t even know what time it is,” Helen told him. “So am I interrupting your swim time?”

Those brown eyes, she noted, were back to that melt-me expression again, but she couldn’t help remembering the other look she had seen recently, the one he’d used on the prisoner. Layers, these guys all had layers.

“No,” he said. His eyes traveled to the water swirling around her shoulders. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Why? Is there a schedule that marks this place closed at this hour?” she asked with a smile. “Besides, I just told you I don’t even know the time.”

His smile was slow, his teeth very white in the shadows. “You shouldn’t be here naked then,” he amended.

There was that. “You see, we could ignore that part and just have a nice conversation about what time it is,” she mocked, “but no, you have to say the obvious. Besides, if you were a gentleman, you wouldn’t have joined me. You would have said, ‘I’ll come back later.’”

Helen leaned back against her tub, trying to be comfortable again. Maybe if she kept talking, she would distract herself. “Tell me, Heath, do you come here for your downtime after work? You were working, weren’t you? Or you would be off resting with all the others.”

“There’s work and there’s work,” he said, his eyes steady.

“Just like there’s touching and there’s touching?” she asked, arching her eyebrows, reminding him of their earlier banter. “You sure have a way with words.”

He leaned back, too, and surveyed her lazily for a few moments. The spray from the moving water had dampened his hair into dark tendrils. A thin gold chain with a small pendant gleamed against his wet chest. The pendant had an unusual shape and color, but she couldn’t really make out what it looked like.

“We could talk, but what are you going to do when you have to leave?” he asked.

She looked at him seriously. “What if you have to leave first?”

His lips curved again. “I’m a very patient man.”

“And do you always get what you want?” she asked lightly. Heath was here for something. She would bet her next chocolate milkshake on it.

“Most of the time.”

“Even if you have to kill to get it?” she asked.

Distraction in the midst of attraction. It was something she had never done before. Most of the time, when she had to distract a target, it had been during an operation, or she was being polite to unwanted interest, or she had to be creative to get out of trouble. This time, she was doing it to distract herself.

“Sometimes.” His tone of voice didn’t change. “You had a long day and then some, even by COS standards. Why aren’t you in bed, Helen?”

“You know, men have been asking me about that all night,” she quipped.

“The last time I saw you, you’d been tranqued. And your leg was injured. The serum should be about out of your system by now, yet you don’t act like you’re in real pain. Either you have miraculous healing powers or you’re on some kind of drugs.”

“I took some painkillers,” Helen admitted, “and it could be why I can’t sleep just yet. And what’s your excuse for not being in bed?”

“You should have come to me. I’m very good at taking pain away,” he said, then gave her that sexy smile again. “I’m trained in pressure points.”

Pressure points. And he avoided giving an answer to her question very nicely. “Do you use that in your job a lot, this talent with pressure points?” she asked.

“When I have to.”

“Like tonight?” she asked. “I saw you from the observation room.”

“I know.”

“Do you use it during interrogation?” She searched his expression. That smile was gone and his eyes had the same flat look she had seen previously. “It’s not just for taking away pain, is it? You can give pain by pressing on the right pressure points. I’ve seen it done before.”

He was silent as he continued watching her. He raised one hand and pressed the button on the side of the tub. The rushing jets stopped and the noise fizzled into a tense silence as the water around their bodies slowed its movement. The bubbles were slowly disappearing and it wouldn’t be long before he could see through the water.

“Coward,” she mocked softly. “You don’t like my question so you’re now trying to punish me by embarrassing me.”

Heath leaned forward, his gaze hooded. “Affirmative,” he said.

He moved a little closer toward her and she felt his hand on her leg. “Heath,” she warned, not sure where this was leading to. An image of a hand slipping into her pants floated in her head…Helen pushed the thought firmly away.

“Relax,” Heath murmured. “I’m just going to check your leg. Trust me, if I were planning to do more, I would have come in here naked.”

His hands lifted her leg above the water. He touched the bruise that ran down the side of her thigh to her calf and gave a soft whistle. “Are you sure you don’t feel more than a little pain?”

Helen closed her eyes. There was pain when she had to move the leg. But the moment things were still around her, like now, no noisy water, no jets massaging her legs, no movement…She shivered as his fingers trailed the side of her leg. It was starting again.

“Are you cold?” he asked.

She shook her head, not opening her eyes. She bit her lower lip as he applied some pressure with his forefingers under her knee. He moved closer, bending her leg higher as he pressed harder.

“It’s beginning to hurt,” she told him, opening her eyes.

He was watching her face. “There are many pressure points by the sciatic nerve that runs down your leg. There’s one, high up your thigh. If you apply pressure on it, your limb will go numb a while, long enough for someone to give your leg a deep massage. The whirlpool jets did an okay job, but it’s not going deep enough.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Then maybe you can go to sleep,” he said, matter-of-factly, like a doctor to a patient. “You shouldn’t let pain take away your sleep.”

“Okay,” she said again. If he thought it was the pain, let him. “As long as it’s not more drugs. I’m getting a little tired of drugs right now.”

“Understandable,” he said. “Tell Dr. Kirkland you need a physical therapist who knows more than regular shiatsu.”

“At this hour? We’re not living in a five-star hotel, you know,” Helen said wryly. She regarded him for a second. His appearance here was too coincidental. Had he sought her out or had someone sent him? “We’re being watched, is that it? That’s why you aren’t doing it yourself.”

Heath looked at her coolly. “This is COMCEN. There’s always a possibility that someone’s watching,” he said, with a shrug. “But that’s not it. You don’t want me to touch you right now, Helen. I can feel your tension in your leg. I can’t fix it if your muscles fight me.”