KICK ASS: A Boxed Set (74 page)

“None in Russian?”

The library easily housed over a thousand books. Surely a man with Bogdanov’s national pride would have a few native novels on his shelves, even if just an original copy of
War and Peace.

“Bogdanov was proficient in French, German and Latin, but while he could speak well enough, reading English was beyond him.”

Dante had read the reports, but such esoteric details tended not to stick. He’d concentrated on the bottom line assessment that the code was nowhere to be found.

“Couldn’t he have hidden code in an English text, to throw off anyone who might be looking?”

She paced the room while she snapped on her special nylon gloves. “Perhaps, but I don’t think so. Your agents checked the books for signs of handling, and most of them hadn’t been touched in decades—as if they were simply put here for show.”

“So we ignore the books.”

“For now. The books are almost too obvious. Besides, I think Bogdanov would keep the code somewhere he could see it. Everyday, possibly.”

“How did you draw that conclusion?”

Macy’s attention focused on a painting, an original by a Dutch master of an austere, upper class couple. She answered without taking her eyes off the portrait. “When Gorbachev knocked down the Berlin wall and communism started to fail, Bogdanov feared that some mad countryman would launch an attack against the United States. He created the counter-code so that he personally could stop the destruction. He wanted to save his beloved country from starting World War Three. That’s why he hid the code here in the United States rather than in the Soviet Union. This property belonged to his American wife and has been in her family for years.”

This much, he knew. “Her murder was no accident. If we hadn’t removed the housekeeper, she would have been next.”

Macy pursed her lips, but didn’t speak, smudging her red lipstick while she ran her fingers up and down the picture frame. Dante knew he shouldn’t be noticing her lips, but he couldn’t help himself. When he’d walked into the billiards room earlier with Marshall on his heels, he’d had an instant to recognize what would have happened next if world safety hadn’t interfered.

The way she’d dressed, the way she’d moved—he’d been two seconds away from living out his fantasy. She’d intended to seduce him and no matter his intention to draw out his teasing one more night, she would have succeeded in changing his mind. Last night, when he locked her in the room, he’d expended the last of his control. With blood rushing to his cock and his brain starving for nutrition, he’d barely put her off for one more evening.

His time had run out. She wanted him. And if not for this ominous change in the course of their operation, she would have had him, likely right on the billiards table.

Macy moved to a curio case filled with knick-knacks all related to tobacco and smoking. A collection of antique pipes. A snuffbox. A cigar cutter inlaid with genuine mother-of-pearl.

“Bogdanov played chess. His hobbies included puzzles, mainly those in three dimensions,” she answered. “I suspect he hid the code by creating a pattern of objects.” She marched to the desk, lifting an ink blotter first, then the pen set, then a tarnished silver vase. “And he’d keep it out in the open.”

“Hidden in plain sight?” he guessed.

“Yes. Visual connection to the counter-code would have given him comfort. He was a worrier. He often wrote his formulas, even the ones he’d memorized, on large sheets of paper and hung them in his laboratory. That’s why I started my search with the kitchen. He loved to cook and spent many hours there.”

Dante crossed his arms, fighting the knowledge that his presence was completely unnecessary. Before they’d begun, she’d assured him that talking through the dilemma might bring some clue to light that would help, but he wondered if taking the time to talk out loud wasn’t slowing her down.

“So you’re searching the rooms in the order of how much time he spent there?”

“With the exception of the billiards room, yes. I tried that room on a hunch. You can’t imagine how ticked I am that it didn’t pan out.”

For a split second, Dante didn’t register her full meaning. When he did, he couldn’t contain an ironic chuckle.

“I guess some things aren’t meant to work out the way we planned.”

She spun and surprised him with a quirked grin. “The best things never do.”

* * *

Macy stormed out of the library, stalked into the parlor and because she knew she’d already thoroughly searched the room top to bottom, kicked a small ottoman across the room. She screamed in impotent frustration, dragging her hands through her hair and toyed with the idea of pulling the strands free so that her head might stop pounding.

They’d searched through the night and come up with nothing. Zero. Zip. The code had to be here. It had to be.

“The code isn’t here,” Dante announced.

He’d left her ten minutes ago to take an urgent call from Abe. When she realized her boss wasn’t asking to speak to her, her frustration escalated. Now, not only was she a failure, she was a third wheel.

“You don’t know that.”

“Abe says the team in Minsk found the counter-code.”

“Minsk?” she asked, the pitch of her voice stabbing into her brain like an ice-pick. “That’s impossible. By all measures of probability, that’s the least likely place Bogdanov would have hidden the code.”

Dante shrugged. “But he did. The team you sent there is sure of it.”

She shook her head. Because of the low chance that the scientist would entrust the code to a place in his dissolving home country, Macy had sent the greenest agents to Russia. Yes, she’d made sure a more seasoned analyst led the team, but even the leader lacked Macy’s talent and experience.

“I need to see the proof.”

“Abe says the secure network in Russia has been compromised. Something to do with the power grid. They’re resetting the system. The information will be here in twenty minutes, thirty at the latest.”

Macy didn’t hold back, but screamed in unbridled frustration. Protocol demanded that the team set up fail safes to avoid this kind of delay. Her team had screwed up.
Her
team. Even if they had found the code, when they regrouped in Paris, heads were going to roll.

Beginning with hers.

Dante approached her with caution, but her nerve endings registered every inch of his progress with spikes in her body temperature. Her anger, frustration and fear collided with the lust she’d only barely contained once she’d decided to turn the tables and seduce Dante before he succeeded in seducing her.

Now, if the impending disaster was truly thwarted—or if the team was wrong and the world was still at risk of descending into chaos—didn’t she want one last glorious memory to pull her through the darkness?

A vivid, fresh, intense memory of Dante making love to her?

When he cupped his hand gently on her shoulder, she harnessed her fears, regrets, reservations and rage and launched herself against him. She captured his mouth with hers and locked her hands against his cheeks. He had no means of escape.

And neither did she.

He didn’t deny her. They inhaled each other, tongues mating, until neither of them could breathe.

He swung them out of the parlor. With half a coherent thought, Macy figured he meant to take her upstairs. To the master suite? She didn’t care where they made love, so long as the event happened in the next few minutes. Her flesh flamed and with one quick tug, she divested herself of her zippered blouse and then tore at Dante’s shirt until the buttons pinged along the hardwood floor. Seconds later, her bra flew into the air, hooking onto the banister.

Macy locked her legs around Dante’s waist, pressing her sex against his hard erection until a liquid agony filled her. She pulled herself high, gasping when his mouth locked around her nipple and suckled her to near delirium. They’d both wanted this for too long to deny their intrinsic lust any longer.

Shockingly, Dante stumbled beneath their combined weight on about the third step. With a laughing shout, they ended up splayed on the stairs. His pants disappeared first, then hers, along with shoes and boxers and panties. Dante turned, bracing his back against the stairs as Macy climbed over his lap and guided his sex into hers.

The slick sensation spawned renewed fire—white hot and impossible to escape. Macy braced her arms on his knees behind her, arching her back so he could bathe her breasts in desperate kisses. When she thought she’d go insane from his plucking her nipples with his teeth, she returned the favor, yanking his hair into her hands and tugging him close so that no space existed between his lips and hers.

The pace intensified. He grabbed her hips and urged her to take whatever bliss she needed—so she did. His sex thickened inside her, and his hands and lips took greedy license, touching and tasting until she was caught up in a storm of sensations. By the time she’d neared the edge of her climax, Dante pushed her over fast with the guttural glory that was his release.

Moments passed. Sanity returned. When her chest stopped heaving, Macy realized that more than anything in the world, she wanted to stay right where she was, curled over Dante’s lap, connected to him physically, breathing hard while he stroked her hair. He whispered something into her ear that she couldn’t understand, which was fine with her, because she didn’t want to hear. Words had the power to destroy this tentative truce.

Words, and the fact that they were on the staircase, which while exciting at the moment, was not exactly comfortable. She rolled off of him, but unashamed and with no regret, she snuggled beside him and stared up at the ceiling.

Only there wasn’t a ceiling there exactly—it was covered by a long, artfully cut mirror.

She blinked. How odd.

“Macy, I want to tell you about the Chilean operation.”

Dante caught her attention and she dragged her gaze away from the mirror. For a second, she wondered just how hot Dante had gotten being able to watch her on top of him, but his eyes reflected a seriousness she’d once easily trusted.

Past hurts aside, she needed to hear his explanation. Before they parted ways again, she needed to hear how he would justify the breach of her trust that had ruined their relationship—and her career within the Arm.

“Why did you pass my intelligence work off as your own?” she asked.

“Because Russell didn’t trust you.”

His lie slapped her in the face. “Russell? He recruited me!”

Dante frowned. “He was also hot for you, but you made the mistake of falling into bed with me.”

Macy didn’t want to believe that her mentor had mistrusted her, but she couldn’t discount Dante’s theory, either. Russell Rhodes had brought her into covert ops after she’d served in the CIA for less than a year. He’d trained her himself, arranging for her to shadow him on missions where she was the youngest agent by ten years or more.

He’d never made a move on her, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t been interested. Learning to ignore flirting had gotten her through her teen years, when the house had been full of her brothers’ many friends and most of them, older and younger, had tried to make a play for her. The same had held true during college when she’d studied advanced mathematics and then in the CIA. Thrown into situation after situation where men outnumbered the women ten to one, she’d become immune to subtle attempts at seduction. A guy had to practically hit her over the head to show her that his interest was sincere.

Or whip her into a whirlwind of lust and desire as Dante had.

“Russell had the ear of the Joint Chiefs,” Macy said, unable to voice the possibility that her name could have been sullied all the way to the Oval Office. “You’re saying he poisoned their minds against me because I was sleeping with you?”

Dante turned and stretched his legs, balancing on one elbow so he could toy with her hair with his hand.

“Yes, but he tipped his hand when he blamed you for the information that leaked in the Boston operation. Every agent in the field knew that Jim Carlson had blown that deal.”

Macy’s head swam. These were operations that had happened so long ago. Before she’d become a trusted agent within T-45. Back when she’d been nothing more than a rank beginner in the Arm.

“But Carlson died in Boston,” she argued.

“Exactly. He wasn’t around to take the heat, so you were the sacrificial lamb. Even if he’d lived, he might have turned the blame on you, too. He trained with all the men who ran the Arm, including some of the Joint Chiefs. You were a young, pretty upstart who they knew would soon surpass them all. Russell couldn’t prove his accusations, but he planted enough seeds of doubt to have you red-listed.”

Meaning she was an agent to be watched—an agent who might not be trustworthy.

Dante threaded his fingers in hers, working out the sudden attack of tension with a soft massage. “I pulled some strings and kept you on the Chilean project, but when you found the intelligence we needed to break the case, I had to make a choice.”

Macy narrowed her eyes. God, how she’d tried not to think about that time, his betrayal, her incredible emotional loss. The case had been sloppy from the start, and now she knew why. The lead operative, Russell Rhodes, had apparently had his mind on other things. She’d been trying to stop an influx of cocaine from being smuggled in by Chilean freighters. He’d been trying to ruin her reputation and get her booted from the Arm.

All because she’d loved Dante instead of him?

She supposed men had started wars for less.

“The information was sketchy, I remember,” she said, the recollection painful even as a chill skittered across her skin. “I couldn’t find a second source to verify the ties between the Chilean shipping company and the Brazilian businessman we’d had under observation for six months.”

“The rich Brazilian businessman with ties to our President’s re-election campaign,” Dante reminded her. He rubbed his hand up her arm and noting the gooseflesh, grabbed his shirt from the bottom of the stairs and wrapped the material around her. “I suspected Russell might have planted the intel to discredit you entirely, so I called his bluff. If the information proved false, I would have been blamed for the bad data. When it proved true and the mission was successful, I finally had the clout to push Russell out of the way. Once I was in charge, I could repair the damage he’d done to you.”