Hard Target (24 page)

“I’m sorry,” she whispered on impulse.

“I know.” He rolled farther away. “Get some sleep.”

Closing her eyes, she drifted into a broken sleep filled with shattered dreams. Eight hours later, his place swept for listening devices and coming up clean, they made breakfast in Simon’s apartment. Though the tension remained, like an old married couple, they moved past each other in the tiny kitchen with a rhythm she’d forgotten they once possessed. Their bodies knew one another with a magnetic intimacy that kept them revolving around each other with sure-footed movements.

Plates, coffee mugs, eggs, toast, jam—each item in their breakfast agenda appeared without comment from either of them. She knew he liked his eggs scrambled. He knew she enjoyed her toast just this side of overdone. No butter on his. The scrape of a knife against her piece as he liberally slathered raspberry jam. They slurped coffee and tea. Read the paper.

A text message chimed on his phone and he lifted the device from the table. “Jenny convinced David to go along with everything.”

“Good.” Alex searched his face, hoping to find some indication there of the connection they’d shared.

He cleared his throat. “Shower?”

Her cheeks heated when an image of him naked, water streaming down his chest in a waterfall to his hard, wide cock, sprang to her mind’s eye.

Knowing he hadn’t issued an invitation, she said, “You can go first.”

Simon nodded and pushed away from the table. The cotton fabric of his striped pajama bottoms clung intimately to his tautly muscled ass. Transfixed, she watched him walk toward the sleeping area. Without knowing how, she found herself standing nearby, watching as, back to her, he stripped off his pants and reached for his robe. Catching her stare in a mirror, Simon halted mid-motion. A funny tumbling feeling hit Alex’s stomach as her self-control slipped from her grasp and began a freefall descent out of sight.

Seeming to return to himself, Simon slipped his robe on and jerked the tie closed as he faced her. “What’s up?”

“I never betrayed you.” Her words surprised them both. Simon blinked at her and she rushed on, not knowing where the guts to bring all this into the open finally came from. “During the questioning they accused me of giving you my password. Tried to get me to admit to collusion. I…I told them I couldn’t imagine how you’d gotten the data. They hammered at me. Presented fact after fact until I couldn’t think. I told them about when we hacked into each other’s home machines.”

A great weight lifted as she admitted the worst of what she’d done. Simon’s stare remained dispassionate, though the arms he crossed protectively over his torso told a different story.

“I’m so sorry. When you wouldn’t see me… Wouldn’t even look at me that day in the courtroom…” Remembrance elicited high emotion and she pressed her fist against her chest. “I thought you had used
me
.”

“You should have known.” Simon’s jaw worked in tight little motions.

“Yes. I should have. I have no excuse for that mistake, but I never lied to you. I never went to them or gave them your key. And now you have proof of who planted the evidence against you.” Alex crossed the room to him as she spoke. Finally, she stood in front of him. “I’ve risked so much for you over the past several days. Can’t you try to forgive me? Trust me more than you did last night with the information about Lily? At least enough not to shut me out of an op that’s critical to my career?”

He blinked, then his gaze shuttered. What she saw there made her want to beg—a cold detachment and unwillingness to let her in.

“Are you sure you don’t want the shower first?” he asked with casual coolness.

Though she knew he simply couldn’t cope right now—not with her and not with the coming mission, something in her snapped. Years of wanting to be with him, yet believing he’d either lied to and manipulated her or cast her out of his life without so much as a backward glance—just like her mother—came roaring to a head.

Without consciously knowing why or how, she found herself aiming a slap at his handsome face. Flesh smacking loudly against flesh, he blocked her with his arm. In a series of trained movements, he kept her at bay. A leg sweep he dodged. An elbow he ducked. He let her strike out again and again. Tiring her. Forcing her toward the bed. When he had her against the frame, he caught her around the middle, spun her around, and pinned her arms to her sides.

Trapped, Alex head-butted him in the chin. A loud clack of his teeth and a grunt, as well as the pain shooting through her skull spelled satisfaction. He cursed and ripped open her shirt. Her breasts spilled out and he grasped the flesh in his hands. Alex arched into his touch. Lust replaced anger. The energy of their fight morphed into arousal. Pushing her ass into Simon’s erection and her breasts into his palms, she moaned.

Hot breath caressed her ear. “Bend over the bed.”

The high, swinging mattress, she knew, would bring her to just the right height for fucking. Squirming away, still panting from their fight, Alex shrugged out of her ruined top and did as Simon commanded. Cool air met her flesh as he hooked his fingers into her shorts and slid them down to her knees.

Another slither of fabric. A press of heated flesh to her pussy. The silken touch of his cock nudging for admittance. He pressed a hand to her lower back, simultaneously holding her down and using her for leverage. One slow, relentless push seated him inside her—stretched her walls and filled her with shameless need. Though she knew he fucked her only because he was just as far gone with lust as she, she didn’t care. He was where he belonged, inside her, bringing them both to heights of unimaginable pleasure.

The tangle of silken sheets rasped against her nipples when each bump of his hips to her ass sent her and the mattress swinging forward. He wrapped a hand over her shoulder, hauling her closer when she slipped too far away. Alex clutched the sheets in her fists and rode the swell of an orgasm that took her too quickly for her to conceal a cry of dismay.

She pictured Simon standing above her, dominant and glorious, his skin shining with sweat and his face colored with passion. Eyes glazed with need, lower lip between his teeth, he’d look down at the curve of her hips and swell of her ass, transfixed as his glistening cock reemerged and disappeared between her pussy lips.

Flesh slapped with each impact of his hips to her ass. Wet sounds betrayed her arousal even if he didn’t feel her walls clenching with need. Tugs of pleasure caught at her clit, shoving her toward another release. She arched upward and he fell forward, clasping her to him. Breath harsh in her ear, he fucked her harder, losing control of his movements as he brought her over the edge with him.

The musk of Simon’s sweat and her sex cushioned Alex in afterglow. For long minutes she forgot about Downing, arguing with Simon, and how much she wanted her promotion. Nothing existed but the man pressed against her, breathing into her hair and stroking his palm along her waist.

“God, I feel boneless.” She laughed, self-conscious.

“Mph.” Simon breathed into her ear and peeled himself away before rolling to lie sideways on the bed.

She lifted her head. One arm thrown over his eyes, sweat dripping from his brow and spiking his hair, he appeared relaxed. Sated.

“I’m going to make you trust me,” Alex whispered.

Lifting his elbow, he opened one eye to look at her like some emerald-eyed dragon she’d awakened from a thousand-year slumber. The challenge in his gaze said he doubted her, but the glance he flicked to her lips said he’d like nothing more than for her to succeed.

Simon downed the tiny glass of water and tried to make it appear as if he threw back a shot of vodka. He’d already ordered six of the drinks from Ryan over the past hour and held up his finger for another shot. Undercover, the agent adjusted the sleeve of his bartender’s tux and braced one forearm along the bar.

“I think you’ve had enough, sir.” Ryan spoke loud enough for his words to carry among the museum’s genteel crowd.

“How ol’re you?” Simon muddled the question as he leaned unsteadily over the bar to grab at the agent’s sleeve.

It was a question to which Simon had wanted the answer ever since he’d seen the way the man looked at Alexandra. The other was,
Have you slept with my ex?
but he couldn’t risk blowing their cover, so he stuck to a safer subject.

Ryan barely blinked. “Twenty-eight.”

Swaying on his feet, Simon studied the man, trying to see him the way Alex might see him. Dark curls fell above chocolate-brown eyes. Women loved chocolate… Simon thought of his own eyes. Green. What did green eyes look like? He struggled to think of something flattering but only came up with grass and mold. Glaring, he dropped his arm heavily.

They were equal in height, but Ryan had the build of someone who had started working out with weights at an earlier age. Simon’s muscles were leaner in comparison to Ryan’s bulky swagger. When he’d been reading books with the appetite of a nerd-in-training, Ryan had undoubtedly been in the gym doing squats and having bench-pressing contests with his buddies. Well, at least he could probably best the man at chess, and Alex loved chess.

“You gonna get me that drink?”

Ryan turned away. “You go use the gents and I’ll have something for you when you get back.”

Waving his hand and making a
pftft
sound, Simon aimed some of the resulting spittle at the back of Ryan’s tuxedo jacket, then turned to take in the revelers. Dressed in glittering black and white for the event, donors and their guests enjoyed pâté and chitchat under the five-story-high skylights. Though draped with white scallops of material, the ceiling showed slices of night sky between the strips. Somewhere, up there, Alex made her way to the roof of the small wing along the MoMA courtyard using every ounce of climbing skill she possessed.

Knowing he had only minutes to rendezvous with her, Simon wove unsteadily past Gun and Jenny who chatted with David and Kyra. All four pretended not to see him, but Simon saw them stiffen with the effort not to glance his way. David had procured them the tickets to the event with the promise that he’d find a way to kill them all—after he fired them—should anything cause his name to end up in the papers.

Simon staggered into the men’s room and pretended to use the urinal while another man preened in the mirror, applying, of all things, eyeliner.

You look Goddamned gorgeous
,
he thought.
Now scram.

As if hearing Simon’s thoughts, the man flicked a glance his way, then put his nose in the air and walked out of the room. Not wasting any time, Simon pulled on his gloves, reached under the vanity and found the very long steel pole the FBI’s undercover janitorial operative had duct-taped there for him. Somehow he had to get this thing up to the fifth floor and return to the second floor to let Alex in without anyone seeing him.

Taking a deep breath, he grabbed the pole and peeked out the door. As promised, Jenny had spilled her drink while walking from the event toward the ladies’ room. One of the janitorial staff had roped off the area and slowly mopped the floor, his back to Simon. A side hall led toward a series of escalators that in turn led up to the fifth floor. Simon sprinted up them, the pole jutting like a lance from his fist.

At the top of the fifth floor escalator he paused for good measure and took a roundabout route to the gallery where the painting hung. The empty upper floors echoed his footsteps and he cursed his patent leather shoes. At the gallery, he jammed the precisely measured pole under the edge of the nearly concealed fire barrier.

Silence made his ears ring, the only accompanying sound a faint buzzing from the lights. Somehow the emptiness of the galleries, devoid of human sound and movement, made the walls feel stark despite the splashes of color in the artwork. Tonight would be the time for Alex to get a good view of Monet’s
Water Lilies
, but their timeline was too compressed for a side trip.

Heart pounding a tad more than perhaps it should have, Simon inspected the pole briefly before leaving the way he’d come. More useful behind the scenes with his technology skills, he’d only engaged in a very few undercover operations. Sure, he had an encyclopedic understanding of explosives, firearms and spy craft in general, but he’d gotten little opportunity to put it to practical use. When he thought about it, he supposed he was, in effect, as green as his eyes.

“Can we kill the inferiority complex now?” he muttered to himself as he traversed three escalators toward the second floor. “James Bond wouldn’t think this shit.”

No, James Bond would relish the opportunity to get frisky with Alex in the upper gallery. His dick wouldn’t have shriveled at the thought of being hauled off in a pair of handcuffs either. Breathing deep, Simon attempted to channel the fictitious soul of his childhood hero as he approached the little café on whose second-floor terrace Alex now stood in a beaded silver evening gown.

Without time to contemplate how the hell she’d descended fifty stories from the adjacent building in that getup, he made a snap decision that if she could rappel in fuck-me pumps he could at the very least give the appearance of not pissing himself over a couple hours in a jail cell.

“Ready?” he mouthed.

She held up one finger and took off the shoes, then straightened and nodded.