Undercover Lover (10 page)

Günter whipped around, fists balled, and glared at the closed door.

When the hell had that happened?

“Easy there,” Simon tossed out. “There’s not enough fuel to fly back to New York to commit another homicide.”

Brushing aside crazy making thoughts he could do nothing about, he focused instead on the coming confrontation. If Ian didn’t manage to get the support they needed… Well, he had a backup plan, sort of, but nothing he’d like to have to rely on.

The dots on the landscape resolved into houses, and he could see individual automobiles winding through the bleak, winter landscape. His mind ping-ponged back to Jenny rather than contemplate myriad ways the scenario at the airport could go awry.

He wasn’t stupid. He knew very well he could fall in love with her if he let himself. Intelligent, independent, beautiful and feisty—loyal too unless he missed his guess— she exhibited all the qualities he’d come to require and appreciate in a woman, save one. Honesty. She’d lied to him. For that reason alone a relationship with her should be out of the question.

The door to the sleeping cabin opened and he watched the object of his musings walk toward him. She’d wound her hair at the back of her head and wore her jeans paired with a white long-sleeved tee. The boat-like swoop of the neckline emphasized her graceful posture, but the lack of color emphasized the pallor of her complexion. Even her normally rose-pink lips appeared bloodless. His heart gave an unaccustomed lurch at seeing Jenny so drawn.

Before he thought about what he was doing he patted the leather cushion of the seat next to him. “Sit. We’re landing,” he said.

Jenny folded herself into the seat like a child, legs tucked under her, and leaned against him. Without the barrier formed by the armrest on commercial airplanes, the warmth and softness of her entire torso pressed into his chest. Günter froze until his heart kick-started and he wound his arms around her, telling himself it was only for her protection.

“It’ll be all right,” he whispered into her hair. “We’ll begin in Oxford. Not London.”

She nodded and her body relaxed.

He’d done the right thing. Said the right thing. For a moment, or two, he allowed himself to pretend everything would work out. In England. For him. For them.

“Mr. Faust.” The pilot’s voice came over the sound system. “MI-5 has ordered me to lower the door or they’ll take us by force.”

A beat of silence.

“I’m lowering the door.”

Simon cursed softly.

Günter said nothing. Remained motionless in the seat beside Jenny.

Her heart crashed repeatedly against her ribs. The hydraulic whir of the door and stairs unfolding made her dig her nails into Günter’s arm. If he noticed, he didn’t let on. She eyed the airsick bag tucked into the seat pocket in front of her, wondered if she could open it in time if she needed it.

A count of two. The clatter of booted feet on metal stairs. The solid
thunk
and hiss of a gas canister as it rolled into view. Surely if MI-5 didn’t kill her, a heart attack would. Fog rapidly filled the plane, and Jenny clutched a cloth Günter had given her earlier over her nose and mouth.

“Disembark with your hands in sight.” A disembodied voice issued the demand over the plane’s speakers and Jenny wondered how they’d patched into the sound system.

She hadn’t been able to see outside after Günter closed the window shades, but her imagination supplied black government SUVs, agents with guns drawn, and a body armor-sporting SWAT team.

Günter stood and helped her to her feet. She stumbled and he gave her shoulder a squeeze to stop her exit from the plane.

“Simon’ll go first. Then me,” he said, from behind his own cloth. “When it comes your turn, do as they say.”

“Shouldn’t you leave that here?” Jenny asked, her eyes drawn to his weapon. Even in the dim light, its brushed black metal shone, sinister.

“They’ll want to make a show of taking it,” he answered.

She accepted the explanation without thought as the fog began to leak under the cloth, stinging her nostrils and making her choke with its chemical stench.

Simon exited first. Jenny couldn’t see around Günter’s broad back to the stairs, but it seemed to her that it took forever before she heard shoes scuffling against the pavement as agents approached and disarmed him. The snap of metal cuffs echoed loud in the hangar.

“Christ guys, take it easy, will you?” Simon said on a grunt. “We haven’t been on opposite sides of a war in over a hundred years.”

A car door slammed and Jenny saw Günter’s back expand as he took a deep breath and coughed.

“Why couldn’t you just let me pay off Gray?” Jenny dug for answers—a way out of their predicament—even if only in retrospect.

He looked back at her, the tilt of his head emphasizing the gold streaks in his shoulder-length hair, and she curled her fingers against the impulse to brush an errant strand from the plane of his worried brow.

“Just do as they say,” he reminded her.

Her answering nod felt jerky—as if her neck could barely support the weight of her head.

Schooling his expression, Günter descended, his steps deliberate as he kept his hands high and visible. The moment he stepped onto English soil, three agents took him down like the biggest threat to national security since Napoleon. One threw him to the pavement face first while another disarmed him and a third snapped cuffs on his wrists so tightly Jenny could swear she saw bruises bloom from where she stood.

“Fuckers,” Simon swore in response to their rough handling of his boss.

Jenny’s stomach heaved at the violence. Memories, long buried, surfaced.
Smaller wrists in heavy cuffs. The shuffle of tripping feet. Police ferrying her mother to a waiting car.
Oxygen burned her lungs. She struggled for breath. Fought the stark images as they restored their jagged hold on the fabric of her mind.

Agents heaved Günter by the cuffs, the force seeming to wrench his arms at the sockets. One put him in a chokehold to keep him still. Another frisked him in motions designed to pummel.

Günter grunted and bowed his head. Shirt torn and a red scrape marring his nose, he looked like a hired gun brought to heel. Something in Jenny snapped to see him felled, so thoroughly humiliated.

“Stop!” Without knowing how, she reached the bottom step where one of the suited agents grabbed her. “Stop hurting him!”

She twisted, doing her best to fight the agent’s hold, but he snapped her arms up high behind her back. Cold cuffs slapped around her wrists, bringing them together with a vicious tug that buckled her knees.

A battle cry tore from Günter’s throat and he broke away. As he reached her side, a club to his ribs brought him stumbling to the ground in front of Jenny.

“Günter?” Fear bathed her tongue, choking her throat with its foul taste.

“Hush, sunshine.” Though he couldn’t touch her, she felt the implicit caress of his fingers down her cheek. “It’s all right.”

“Get up.” Someone yanked her roughly and Günter renewed his struggles.

A man with hair like night and eyes black as sin stepped from the shadows. “Leave them be,” he said.

“Thank God,” Günter breathed, the snarl falling from his face.

Jenny felt his relief. Saw it in the relaxing of his shoulders, the slowing of his breath.

“About time you showed up, Ian,” he said.

“You’re lucky I came at all.” Ian’s severe expression carved harsh lines in a face already impossibly stark.

Jenny’s cry of distress drowned out Günter’s reply as an agent wrenched her arm, yanking her to her feet.

“O’Rourke?” Ian’s terse bark made her captor pause. “Gently.”

O’Rourke nodded once—a terse jerk of his balding head—and propelled her toward a waiting vehicle.

Jenny slid in first. Günter and Simon entered on either side. Though her hands and arms ached, she sat back, wanting to feel the brush of the men’s shoulders. Their bulk offered both comfort and warmth. At the moment her shaking frame needed an ample helping of each.

Ian started the engine and O’Rourke took the passenger seat.

“Was all that rough-up really necessary?” Günter asked.

The agent glanced at his detainees, the width of the rearview mirror emphasizing the up-tilt of his eyes above the wide expanse of impossibly high cheekbones.

“I know, right? I still can’t feel my left testicle,” Simon said then looked at Günter. “And what’d you do? Piss on a corgi?”

“I owed him for betting against United last year,” Ian replied, the devious sparkle in his eyes saying he’d had a private joke with Günter.

“United?” Simon’s brow crinkled. “Wasn’t that an airline?”

“Manchester United,” Günter clarified as they pulled out of the hangar.

Incredulous, Jenny listened to the odd banter. Where grim silence should have reigned, a lighter if slightly tense air had overtaken the vehicle. Humor hardly seemed appropriate at such a time, but no one other than she seemed to find it strange.

“That’s what you meant by
Liverpool
?” Simon asked Günter.

Günter nodded.

“Soccer freaks,” Simon said with a snort.

“Hey there, it’s
football
, ya yank,” O’Rourke chided, his apple cheeks mottling with color as he delivered the insult.

“No,
football
is that line drive tackle your partner flattened my boss with, not some sissy game that pretends to have balls, and I don’t mean the inflatable kind.”

Günter choked on his laughter and O’Rourke shifted to look over the seat at Simon. “Ya want ter live out yer stay, yank? I’d not talk as ya do ’bout our boys.”

Finally able to breathe, Günter said, “A line drive is baseball,
professor
. When they add quarterbacks to the major leagues, I’ll make certain you get credit for the idea.”

Simon began to wriggle in his seat and Günter taunted, “What? No comeback?”

“I’m planning on giving you the finger, but it’ll have to wait a minute,” he said with an accompanying grunt as he worked the loop of his arms under his knees in a demonstration of flexibility that had to be seen to be believed. When he finished, instead of resting behind his back, his cuffed hands were in front.

“What are you doing?” Jenny asked, finally finding her voice. How could everyone be so relaxed when they were all headed to jail?

Wrists stretched out in front of him, Simon wiggled his fingers and answered, “Getting comfortable.”

Jenny watched, fascinated, as he took apart a pen he’d pulled from his pocket and used his teeth to wiggle a bit of metal into one of the keyholes on the cuffs. Nobody seemed inclined to stop him, and she wondered if he’d be successful before they tried.

“Give him the key, O’Rourke,” Ian said, clearly annoyed. “He’ll break the locks with that shit.”

Jenny looked from Günter to Simon to Ian in bemusement. “You’re letting us go?”

“Turn around,” Simon prompted, and Jenny shifted so he could undo her cuffs as well. “You should have told her the plan sooner, Gun.”

“What plan?” Jenny asked, massaging one wrist between a thumb and forefinger.

“We’ll talk la—” Günter began.

Simon spoke right over him. “Our arrest in front of the other agents was a ruse so MI-5 could put us in protective custody while the threat level is assessed.”

Aghast, she looked from Simon to Günter, unbelieving. Not even he could be that cruel. Ian’s steady look in the mirror, however, told her otherwise. Swiveling to face Günter she sputtered incomprehensibly as anger and betrayal vied for prominence on the battlefield of her emotions.

“You bastard,” she finally choked out. “Do you have any idea what you put me through?”

Günter held her eyes for an angry beat. “I ensured you’d be able to act the part of a victim.”

“Fuck. You.” Jenny’s eyes filled with tears born of anger.

“That’s cold. Even for you,” Simon said to his boss, then turned to Jenny. “It could’ve gone either way if Ian hadn’t been able to intervene. We weren’t entirely sure ourselves he’d be there.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Jenny directed the question to Günter.

Stony-faced, Günter stared straight ahead.

“You didn’t trust me to keep your secret,” she guessed.

Günter grunted. “Or not to lie about it later.”

Jenny’s face flamed.

“You can be such a…what do you call it?” Simon curled his lip at his boss as he searched for the right word. “Wanker.”

“You’re fired,” Günter said, his voice deadly calm as he stared his second down.

Simon’s mouth opened and shut. His skin paled then turned a ruddy red that almost matched his hair.

“Take it back,” Jenny demanded, horrified. “Simon, he didn’t mean it.”

“Oh, he means it.” Fist clenched around the handcuff key, Simon glared. “Günter never says anything he doesn’t mean. He might be a bastard, but he’s an honest one.”

Irritation still plainly written in the flat line of his lips, Günter shifted, ostensibly to provide more blood flow to his still-bound hands.