Taking the Bait: An ARC Operatives Romance
Read Taking the Bait: An ARC Operatives Romance Online
Authors: Audrey Noire
EBOOK EDITION
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission of the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages for review purposes only. This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, or any events or occurrences, is purely coincidental. The characters and story lines are created by the the author's imagination and are used fictitiously.
Cover image designed by Avery Knott at
http://www.averyknott.com
To the Brain Trust: Britt, Cinna, Gina, Joce, Lefty, and Rone.
As well to all the very kind folks on the Tumblrs.
Thanks for all the hilarious cat memes, and also, you know, for being there.
(Also to Agatha. I am so sorry it took me so many years, and that
the first thing I published was the smuts. Okay, I’m not that sorry. The smuts are great.)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter
One
Nicolai Novik’s expression was deadpan, unreadable, and a little unnerving. He was eyeing up his dossier, gaze flicking back and forth over the paper and profiles within it. He ran a hand through his dirty-blond hair and sighed, long and low. At least because English was his second language he wasn’t super-fast at reading it, since he was super-fast at pretty much everything else (including getting into the pants of the receptionists and assistants that were running all over ARC’s offices, holy wow had he burnt through ladies like Daria’d gone through funny-shaped erasers in elementary school).
There was nothing like a team made up of a nearly-dead-half-recovered ARC operative and a nameless ARC former-intern to do an undercover mission at a billionaire business convention, right? At least, Daria hoped there would be nothing like them and they wouldn’t fail and go down in a hail of bullets. Even over a year of training to be an undercover operative hadn’t exactly boosted her self-confidence, especially since in quite a few of her courses she’d only passed with middling grades.
She thought back to before she’d begun down the path towards super-secret spy work. Her supervisors had plucked her out of her internship in the labs as the ink was still drying on her degree. She’d been hustled off (‘transferred’ was the official word for it) from her tiny job paper-chasing after a kind but generally hapless bio-engineering scientist named Dr. Robert Fowler, and put through a series of rigorous tests designed to ‘assess her skills and talents’.
During the testing process there’d been no coffee-fetching test, and definitely no pop-quiz on how to scoop up great thrift-store finds. Daria had figured she’d failed miserably and would have to do the workplace walk-of-shame back to her old boss down in Lab #3b, continue her internship and hope for a good letter of recommendation from him. Not that she would have minded… Robert had been the laid-back kinda boss-guy, and she’d liked working with him even if the hours were kinda wonky.
To her great surprise though she’d passed the tests she’d been given. When she’d looked down at her acceptance and new employment contract with astonishment, Anastasia Rykov, the operative administering the majority of the testing had just raised one perfectly groomed eyebrow and said,
“What, you think ARC picks fools for interns? You were groomed for this from the start.” That had been a startling revelation.
When she’d first applied to the internship at ARC, she hadn’t realized exactly what the organization was, not really. To her, it was supposed to be an easy-credit grab in hard sciences: spend six months trailing after a scientist in a multi-national corporation lab, doing all the things he didn’t want to do like grabbing coffee, writing out his dictated notes, whatever, then graduate. Sure, the arm of ARC she’d applied to was very science-y, but it was the rest of ARC that had given her a shock when she realized how huge, and how influential they were. It’d started with little things, overhearing conversations in the lunch room about such-and-such government contract, or seeing a glimpse of military paperwork (redacted of course) slipping across her desk when she had to file reports for Robert.
Over the course of her six months she started to realize just how deep-in ARC was with a vast majority of the free world’s governments. Not that she minded, it wasn’t any of her damn business and she wasn’t the type to take her work home with her. As a lowly intern, she just kept her head down, shuffled paper, and occasionally flirted with some of the operatives who came in to see her boss. One such op named Frank Balfour, a big brawny blond guy with a slightly crooked nose, had taken a liking to her and brought her donuts and sometimes little tacky souvenirs from places she didn’t think were actually safe for American citizens to travel to. The shelf above her desk had been littered with tiny flags, miniature edifice replicas, and what she swore was a lump shellac’d moose poop that Balfour insisted was fossilized dinosaur excrement. She’d met Rykov shortly after that through Balfour, since the petite black-haired woman was his partner for most of his ‘operations’ whenever he left the country and brought Daria back tchotchkes.
Daria dragged herself back to the present and shot another look at Nicolai. His thumb was sweeping through the papers on the businessmen (and a few women) they were to be meeting with and surveilling. He had apparently bypassed the persona file on himself and on her without a comment or even raised eyebrow. Daria wished she could mirror his cool, but her anxiety and excitement was thrumming just under her skin, making her heartbeat speed up. She thought back to the first time she’d seen him, and learnt more about ARC in the process.
There had been an explosion in downtown Manhattan. It’d taken out a large government building, a library, and a small heritage apartment complex. All ARC employees (and interns) had been ordered to get back to their stations and desks and await further orders. After checking on her few friends who worked downtown, she’d left the copy room where she’d been collating reports for Robert. Walking back to the lab, she heard a commotion behind her. She’d turned and had to press herself up against a wall as a gurney surrounded by doctors and nurses went hurtling past her. On it was a young man with dirty-blond hair, groaning in pain and covered in blood, writhing on the white sheets of the medical cot. The image had stuck with her, giving her nightmares for weeks since it had looked like the kid was half-way dead and probably hadn’t made it. At least, that’s what she’d thought until she’d seen the guy a few months later, upright and most definitely alive.
“What are you staring at?” he had asked her curtly when she stopped short in the lunchroom as he sat there, a cane resting up against his leg that was out of place with his trim and muscular physique. Nicolai, she’d find out his name and a whole bunch about him later, was one of the augmented humans that Dr. Fowler himself had actually been involved with, bringing his expertise on bio-genetics to make certain people more. It was one of ARC’s most coveted, most secretive pet projects, skimming right under the surface of all the work she’d been doing. She’d finally put it all together, what being augmented really was, during basic training when she’d been shoved in with a bunch of other operatives at her level and Nicolai.
In Nicolai’s case, being augmented, being more, meant fast. He was fast, faster than anything she’d ever seen. He could be at one end of the giant indoor gymnasium, and be a the other end in a few heartbeats. He was never a part of their early morning runs, he didn’t have to be since he’d make it around the track in a few seconds. Daria tried not to hate him, there were side effects to being augmented she’d been told, and not all of them were great, but when she was sweating and panting through lap five of the gym she wasn’t all that charitable. Especially because that speed extended to every inch of him- fast metabolism and the ability to eat everything and anything being just one more of his annoying augmentation perks.
“You do not mind, do you?” he asked one afternoon as they all sat down to eat. By mind he meant her food. He grabbed the last of her fries and started shovelling them into his mouth without waiting for her to answer. She stared at him and then snorted, grabbing one last fry before he could eat them all.
“That’s pretty rude,” she said, holding up the fry. He just raised an eyebrow at her, and then the fry was gone from her grip and vanishing between his lips.
“Thanks for saving it for me,
Mila
,” was all he said as he used the stupid nickname he’d given her on their first day of training. He watched her with a smug grin on his annoyingly-attractive face. It was patently unfair that someone had enhanced, basically super, powers or abilities, and was also way-attractive. She had kinda-maybe noticed how well he filled out the tight henley shirts he wore. She wasn’t alone in her admiration for his physique, if the heated glances some of the other junior ops were giving him. On top of that, he had a sweet accent since he’d grown up with working-class immigrant parents straight out of some Eastern European nation she’d never heard of (thanks American public education system!), and it was a party trick he liked to use it on the ladies although rarely her. Except when he called her darling in his native tongue, which always made her heart stutter. Being called darling was just as annoying in a foreign language as it was in English, and it did not help that he had a sexy-half smile that always dogged his expression whenever he was trying to get a rise out of her. Only then did she see a hint of the flirtatious behaviour he lavished on everyone.
“Whatever, Speed Racer, we gotta get back or Rykov is gonna kill me. You can outrun her, I can’t.” She picked up her lunch tray and stood.
“Ehn,” he said with a shrug, “it is not in my best interest to let you die before we even are out in the field. That would look bad on my record, yes? I will take care of you and your stubby legs. You are not so weighty. You will not slow me down.”
Before she could make an outraged noise at the insult to her height and weight, she was curvy not fat, he’d picked her up and tossed her over his shoulder. Somehow she managed to hold onto her lunch as he treated her to a high-speed run through ARC’s hallways back to the gym for afternoon drills as they’d been assigned. It had made her damn nauseous, and she’d nearly hurled what little of her fries he’d let her eat. They were moving so fast she had been barely able to breathe.
So their training had gone like that for more than a year, with Daria constantly feeling like she was coming up short against him especially, since he’d had the benefit of training before he’d been augmented. They’d become sort-of friends in that time, at least getting along well enough that when Rykov had graduated them both to junior operative status, they were being assigned their first mission together: infiltrate and conduct surveillance of some very naughty rich businessmen at one of their own high society conferences.
Which brought her back to hoping that Rykov has been right in picking her and Nicolai for the job. She hoped that her training was enough, that the last three months of intensive time spent with Rykov and Balfour had been enough to smooth out the edges of her behaviour that would make it seem like she wasn’t a monied newlywed. She also hoped that Nicolai’s training had likewise prepared him, and that he would be able to keep from sneering at the well-heeled crowds they were mingling with over the weekend. He didn’t hide his dislike for the wealthy very well.