Elite Metal-ARE-epub (53 page)

Texting back an acknowledgement, she stepped into the elevator as the doors whooshed open. A flight time would have been nice. Where was Gabriel going?

The conference? They could adjust for his arrival. Her?

Her pulse and respiration increased, but she ignored the physiological response. Getting laid should have satisfied that particular need. Hitting Coyle’s floor number, she hit send on the message. An arm stopped the elevator doors from closing. They peeled open again to reveal Gabriel. He stepped inside and hit a floor button. Most people entering an elevator took the empty side and turned to face the door.

Gabriel did neither.

She focused her gaze straight ahead. The part she played didn’t know him.

“Hello, Copper.” His warm voice poured over her, and she flicked a look at him, modulating her surprise to perplexed.

Then, because her voice could give her away, she settled for Japanese and said, “I don’t speak English.”

His slow smile had a devastating effect on her equilibrium. Her pulse leapt and her breathing deepened. This close, she couldn’t miss the rich scent of him filling her lungs. “It’s a good thing I speak Japanese, then.”

The response floored her.

When the elevator arrived at Coyle’s floor, she had a choice—push past Gabriel or stay put. If she left, he’d know she needed something on that floor. If she stayed, she risked tipping her hand.

“Excuse me,” she murmured, holding onto her cover by the skin of her teeth. Submerging herself had never been an issue, but Gabriel was there—and he’d recognized her. How the hell was that possible? Her mind refused to wrap around the possibility.

“After you,” Gabriel said, then followed her out of the elevator. Exactly what she didn’t want him to do. He looked good. The white shirt, faded jeans look worked for him. A business casual that was all masculine. She kept her pace even as she walked down the hall toward Coyle’s room.

She had twenty rooms to make her decision. Gabriel kept pace. Ten rooms from her destination, a scream split the air. A woman stumbled out of a room down the hall wearing a towel and nothing else. Blood speckled her hands, and she whipped her head around to stare at them.

Then opened her mouth and screamed.

Copper stilled, but Gabriel hurried past her. Like a white knight, he tried to catch the woman as she fell. Her bloodied handprints fixed to his shirt as she kept screaming. Joining them, Copper glanced into the room.

Well, she knew why Coyle hadn’t shown up at the mixer. He lay on the floor of the hotel room with his throat slashed. Blood was everywhere. More rooms opened and people stepped out. Elevators dinged downed the hallway. Still walking, Copper left the room, Gabriel, and the screaming woman behind. At the stairwell, she let herself in with her room key then slipped off her shoes and jogged up two flights of stairs. Most people would go down, and she could hear the doors below opening.

On the second flight up, she heard the door below her opening and she went completely still. Gabriel’s soft curse drifted up to her. Would he go down or come up?

Most people would go down, but so far he hadn’t done a damn thing most people would do.

“Sir!” a voice called, and Gabriel swore again. The door closed, and he hadn’t come inside.

Exhaling a relieved breath, she went up another two flights before letting herself out of the stairwell. Shoes on once more, she walked to the elevators and called one. Time to change and report in.

Coyle was dead, and she wasn’t any closer to their leak—except Gabriel was in Las Vegas. All the way to her room, she debated her next step. The obvious one—the one she needed to do because if he was the guilty party, she couldn’t let him escape.

Copper had to see Gabriel again.

See him and trap him.

Chapter Six

By the time the LVPD had finished asking him to repeat his statement a few dozen times, Gabriel returned to the Sunset Royale in search of his quarry. He stopped in the gift shop long enough to drop a twenty on four ibuprofen and a bottle of water for his screaming headache. Whatever cocktail they’d injected him with wore off after a couple of hours.

They’d dumped him in his apartment, which was only slightly better than a ditch somewhere. A series of phone messages had waited for him—most from his section chief and two from agents he’d worked with previously. The amount of heat focusing in his direction meant it was time to take a step back and reevaluate.

What the hell was he doing in Las Vegas? He’d had the conference on his schedule. It would be great research for his advanced students. He also still had a lot of contacts in international commerce. Most of his long term covers had been in mergers, acquisitions along with imports and exports.

He wasn’t here for any of them.

Copper, whoever the hell she was, was in trouble. Downing the ibuprofen with the water, he studied the throngs of people coming and going. Despite the hundreds of cameras everywhere, Vegas was a great place to disappear. If he hadn’t seen the Asian beauty coming down the escalator earlier and crossing the lobby floor for the elevators, he would never have recognized her.

But he’d memorized that walk. He knew it better than he knew his name. Obsession was an ugly word, but at some point he might have to admit his fascination with Copper bordered on obsession. His phone rang, and he tugged it out of his pocket. Only one person had his burner cell number, since he’d ditched his other phone at home. No way had they let him go without observation. If it had been him, he would have tagged the equipment, the clothes and even his body then let him go to see where he went.

He’d gone through airport security twice. Most of the x-ray machines scrambled body taggers. He’d left his gear at home and bought new clothes on the way. “Danvers.”

“I dropped a bag for you at the desk,” Art Sorenson told him. The rat king of San Juan had been in a spot of trouble during a bad deal with Russian Bratva. He’d given Gabriel info, and Gabriel relocated him. Fortunately, Reno was in driving distance to Vegas. “You owe me.”

“Really? I’m thinking that’s one less that you owe me.” He didn’t wait for a response and hung up. Stripping the battery from the burner, he dumped the phone parts in two different trash cans. As promised, a suitcase waited for him at the check in desk.

Clothes. Cash. Fresh ID. And weapons. Art provided a little bit of everything. Just because Gabriel hadn’t been in the field in a few years didn’t mean he was helpless. Whether Copper was in trouble or was trouble remained to be seen, but he planned to be prepared this time.

No more masked men getting the drop on him. Plus, he had handcuffs. If he had to, he’d tie her to a damn bed and handcuff her for good measure. One way or the other, he wanted answers, and he’d get them.

The door to his room was open.

Pulling the .45 from the side pocket of the suitcase, he checked the magazine and used the case to shove the door inward. Copper sat in the middle of the second queen-sized bed, furthest from the door.

Somehow, he wasn’t remotely surprised. Pushing the case to the side, he closed the door and flipped the security lock. Then he nudged the bathroom door open to check inside. Saying nothing, she watched him with too-quiet eyes as he verified the bathroom and closets were empty. He didn’t have a balcony, but he was only on the third floor. If he had to go out the window, the fall would break something, but it wouldn’t kill him.

Like him, she had a gun with her. But hers lay on the bed next to her and she made no move to reach for it. She’d ditched the black wig and funky cosmetics—even the weird contacts changing her eye color. Once more, she was the coppery-haired goddess he’d held in his arms, fresh faced, without a trace of cosmetics. Only her eyes betrayed her youth. The quiet storm in them beckoned him like a siren.

Fuck him if he wasn’t willing to risk the rocks to reach her.

Engaging the safety on the gun, he set it aside and sat down on the bed opposite her. “Hey.”

“Hey.” Her posture straightened. “I didn’t expect to see you in Las Vegas.”

“I’m sure you didn’t expect a lot of things.” Like him remembering his interrogation or shaking off their drugs. Counter intelligence training prepared him for a lot of sick eventualities.

“I’ll give you that,” she said. “You need to go home.”

“No.” Was that the only reason she’d come to his room?

“You checked in under your name.”

“I have no reason to hide who I am.” He tried to gauge her reactions, but she played everything so close. Her expression didn’t change, but her eyes—they kept giving him little insights. Whatever had her unsettled reflected in her troubled eyes. “Why do you want me to hide, Copper?”

“Because I told you, it’s not safe around me. You’re a professor, Gabriel.” The sigh at the end of his name tugged at him, but he stayed right where he was. He didn’t want to miss a nuance of her expression.

“Professors can’t go to Vegas?”

She blinked, the corner of her mouth kicked higher, but she smothered the smile before it escaped. “You’re not just a professor.”

“No,” he said slowly. Fine, he had to give a little to get a little. “You’re not just a gorgeous woman who wandered my way by accident.”

“I won’t answer that.”

“It wasn’t a question, beautiful.” Clasping his hands together, he leaned forward elbows on his knees. “Truce?”

“We’re not at war.”

“The lump on my head says otherwise, sweetheart. So does the crap you tried to shoot me full of to wipe my short term memory.” Not even a flicker of her eyelid. Damn she was good, but she did cut her gaze away briefly, then back.

“Three questions.” The offer went beyond what expected. “Personal. Not professional.” And it came with conditions.

“Believe it or not, I prefer personal questions to professional.” He’d walked away from the seedier aspect of the life of a company man, never knowing who he could trust, always measuring the agenda of a politically inclined section chief against the needs of the mission. Dealing in the currency of blood left him with very little in savings for humanity. “Three questions. How do I know your answers are truthful?”

“Because I won’t answer if I have to lie.”

“Fair.” He considered the offer. “I want to add one other caveat to our deal.”

She swiped that too-pink tongue over her upper lip, and the bolt of it went straight to his cock. Shutting off his libido was impossible around her. He didn’t even want to try. “I’m listening.”

“You stay here tonight.” He pointed to his room. “All night. No disappearing acts, no having someone knock me out. You and me, no one else.”

Pursing her lips, she didn’t dismiss his offer out of hand. With exaggerated slowness, she uncurled her legs and stood. “I’m going for my phone.” Putting words to action, she slipped the cell phone from her back pocket. Three taps later, she fired off a text message. The whooshing noise was a dead giveaway. Still as a statue, she stared at her phone.

He waited. If she said no, would she retreat from the truth offer? Better question, if she said no, would he be willing to let her out the door? Not knowing the answer to the second made him damn uncomfortable.

The phone vibrated, the humming noise splitting the silence. Her expression didn’t change at the message she’d received, yet she relaxed. The stiffness in her shoulders eased, and the corners of her eyes softened. With her finger at the top of the phone, she depressed it and held it down until the phone powered off. Turning it to face him, she said, “I’ll stay.”

Relief unspooled the tension in his gut. She placed the phone on the hotel room desk. He retrieved his own and turned it off, then set it next to hers. With a glance at her gun, she raised her eyebrow.

“Field strip,” he suggested. Without hesitation, she nodded. They turned almost in synchronous motion and, in silence, broke the guns down, unloading them and setting the pieces neatly on the desk.

If he’d had any lingering doubts about her military training, he didn’t now. He finished only a few seconds behind her, and she smiled. The expression cut through his headache in a way the ibuprofen hadn’t managed.

Keeping his tongue in his head, he forced himself not to drool and asked a cool, “What?”

“I win.” Two simple words, laden with humor.

“Didn’t realize it was a race.”

She shrugged. “Everything in life is a competition. If you can’t be the best, why bother?”

“That breaks the world down into two types of people.”

“Yep.” She nodded and circled the table. “Winners and everyone else.”

Not tacking on the word loser didn’t mean she wasn’t thinking it. “Strip.”

“Excuse me?” No offense discolored her words, but she did plant a hand on her hip.

“Strip.” Having her compliant didn’t mean she wasn’t still executing some plan. The only way to assure himself of full honesty was to make sure they had nothing to hide. Undoing the buttons on his shirt, he nodded to hers. “Nothing to hide behind. No deceptions.”

“I see you didn’t add no sex to that list.”

“Oh, sweetheart.” He pulled his shirt off and dropped it over the television. They certainly wouldn’t need it and since TVs were a great place to hide cameras, he wanted to make sure they really did have their privacy. He’d swept the room earlier, but it didn’t hurt to be cautious. “There will definitely be sex. I haven’t had near enough time with you—or positions.”

Pupil dilation said a lot about physiological response and both of hers grew fuller at his declaration. He hadn’t been wrong in that room or when her friend clocked him.

She
cared
. It meant something. He wasn’t sure what yet, but it did, and he could work with the part of her willing to invest in him. If he could win her trust, then he could help her and maybe get her out of whatever situation had dropped her into the life she was leading.

When she made no move to strip, he eyed her and waited. Some situations called for pushing, others called for patience. Copper needed both. The level of control she exerted over herself impressed the hell out of him. He could try to bully her, but if she dug in her heels—no, she wouldn’t go for it. Tonight required patience. He’d pushed outside the restaurant and made some headway until
“Merc”
knocked his ass out.