Undercover Lover (20 page)

He wrested the gun from her hands and she let him have it. Sick of trying.

“You’re going to get us both killed,” he said, the mantra familiar enough that she didn’t have to take off her hearing protection to understand the low growl of his words as he stalked away and ejected the magazine from the gun.

The kick of his rejection reminded her of the booming recoil of the weapon he’d had her practicing with for hours yesterday until her arms ached and she no longer hit the target at all.

Tearing off her safety gear, she heard Simon say, “You’re working her too hard.”

Dimly, she wondered if she and Günter were at one another’s throats because Simon had been gone all week, building up their contacts in London. He’d only returned yesterday afternoon and was due to leave again tomorrow morning. Without his good humor the tension of their looming mission pulled at everyone’s nerves.

“She’s fine,” Günter answered, but Simon wouldn’t let it go and followed him to the table where they’d lined up the gun cases for the afternoon session.

“The recoil on the .45 just about took her arm off yesterday. Of course she can’t shoot today.”

“She has to know what she’s up against,” Günter answered with a light shrug.

Up against?

That was it. She’d absolutely, positively had it.

Engrossed as Günter and Simon were in conversation, she was almost on them before either man noticed her.

“Uh oh,” Simon said when he saw her coming.

Fists braced on the table, Günter turned his head to look at her. Simon snatched up a broom and got busy sweeping up the shell casings littering the floor.

“You know what I’m up against?” Hands on her hips, she looked up at him.

He straightened and folded his arms over his black tee.

“What now?” he asked, sounding bored.

“You.” She shoved her hand against his chest and pushed hard, making him stumble backward before he caught himself on the edge of the table. “You’re what I’m up against.”

Eyes narrowed, hair falling around his face, he bowed his head and stalked toward her. She didn’t move an inch. Not even when he got up into her face.

“What is it about me that you find so problematic?” he asked. “Is it that I make you get off your throne and work for my praise? Or is it that I’d rather see us survive this mess than watch your blood spill, shiny and wet, all over a London club floor?”

She blinked at the violent picture he painted and heard Simon rest the broom against a wall behind her.

“I want to please you,” she admitted, choking on her answer. “And all you can see in me is a…a problem. Something you have to work around or make go away.”

“Unless you can do your job properly, you’re a liability.”

Taking in his steely stare she wondered that they’d ever shared any intimacy at all.

“Isn’t part of my job being convincing as your lover?”

He flinched, but didn’t answer.

“Chances are I’ll never have to touch a gun during this operation,” she said. “You? I’ll have to touch quite a lot.”

Nostrils flaring, he turned away. She stalked around him.

“How do you think the White Tiger’s people are going to react when you make that face when you have to be near me?” The question hurt her pride, but she asked it anyway.

More silence.

“Coward,” she whispered.

“Go back to the cottage,” he said, not looking at her. “Go back now before you push this too far.”

“Too far?
Too far?
” She bordered on hysterical, but she didn’t care. “I’m willingly walking into a potential death trap by your side, and you think
touching
me for the sake of our cover is going too far?”

Expression terse, Günter looked at Simon over her shoulder.

“Take her home,” he said and went back to tidying up the weapons.

Simon stepped next to her.

“No. Just leave me alone. Both of you.”

Black powder stinging her nostrils, she grabbed a gun and pushed her way past both men. Standing at the head of the alley she donned her safety gear once more. Not pausing to draw a breath she fired. Again and again and again. Until the magazine was empty. Pressing the switch she brought the target forward and walked away, leaving the gun on the counter, without waiting to examine the results of her shooting spree more closely.

Stepping outside, she gulped in cold air. Hands on her knees, she bent over and let crisp ozone-tinted oxygen calm her. After a while, she looked around the bleak winter landscape. For the first time since the day in the abbey with Günter she saw something other than gray- and yellow-tinted death.

A soft snow had begun to fall, cushioning everything in a wonderland hush. There was freedom in the silence that she embraced with a split-second decision. She grabbed her coat from the SUV, found the Thames River path, and decided to walk the miles home.

* * * * *

“Want me to do it?” Simon asked.

Günter stilled, his hands flexing around the barrel of the gun as if it were his second’s neck. Jenny had exited the building fifteen minutes ago and his heart just now approximated a normal rhythm.

“You’d better not be asking what I think you’re asking,” he said.

“What?” Simon blinked back at him innocently. Too innocently. “To clean the weapons?”

Günter snapped one metal carrying case shut. “Yeah. I’d come real unglued if you did that.”

“What did you think I was asking?” Simon leaned against the table, black boots peeking from under faded denim.

“Gee, don’t know, Simon.” Günter feigned a nonchalance he didn’t remotely feel as he took a lint-free cloth to an already rubbed down weapon. “Maybe shag Jenny for me?”

“Do you think she’d let me?”

A red haze blanketed Günter’s vision and he fingered the trigger. “Have you asked?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t want to.”

“But you would?”

“I’d do anything to back you up,” Simon answered, arms folded over his torso as he looked down at the concrete floor. “But I think this is something you should handle yourself.”

“So, you agree I should do my job for Queen and Country?”

“You’ll hardly need to lie back and think of England to get through it.” Simon lobbed his analogy back at him. “And I think she’s right. If you cringe every time she touches you, you’re going to blow this.”

“That’s not what I asked. And I don’t cringe every time she touches me,” he said, thinking of their afternoon interlude at the abbey.

“Why is there even a question here?” Simon breathed a laugh. “Your junk knows your mind better than you do. You get a hard-on every time she walks in the room.”

“Keep your eyes off my
junk
,” Günter snapped, unable to deny Simon’s observation.

“Keep your hands off it and I won’t have to.”

Refusing to engage in the ridiculous discussion any longer, Günter grabbed several cases and stopped by Jenny’s alley to clear her target from the clip. What he saw there made his heart leap against his ribs. He folded the paper in quarters and exited the building. Simon followed, carrying the rest of the cases. Swirling flakes caressed Günter’s skin and he breathed deep, relishing the scent he’d come to associate with Jenny.

“Why don’t you want to sleep with her?” Simon asked, annihilating the barriers of their professional relationship and engaging the privileges of friendship with one fell swoop. “Why are you fighting it so hard?”

“She deserves better.” He brushed off the question with an answer he knew was trite as he loaded the cases into the back of the car. A hand rested on his shoulder and he straightened to look Simon in the eye.

“She deserves a man who can bloody well protect her,” Günter clarified. “After everything she’s been through, she at least deserves to be safe.”

“Seems to me Jenny is a woman who knows how to protect herself,” Simon said before he let his hand fall away.

Both men looked around, letting the silence of the moment bring them to the same realization—Jenny had gone ahead on foot.

“So, what now?” Simon asked first. “Where do you think she went?”

“Oh, I know where she went,” Günter answered.

“How?”

“Just do.”

“She’s in your blood,” Simon observed.

“Yeah.” Hands in his pockets, Günter rocked back on his heels, startled by the admission he’d made. Eyeing the Thames meandering through the gentle landscape, he made a decision. “You go on. Take the car back to the house.”

“Where are you going?” his redheaded conscience asked.

“To find her,” Günter answered over his shoulder as he took his cell from his pocket to make some arrangements. It seemed he and Ms. Ainsley had some unfinished business to attend to.

* * * * *

“Whipped cream, luv?” the chocolate vendor asked from her stall on High Street.

Jenny shook her head. Günter would kill her if he knew she’d wrecked her metabolism with the sweet, never mind the cream. Thoughts of her jailer and his recent penchant for military rations had her turning back again with the cup.

“I’ll have that cream after all,” she said.

She and Günter knew there was nothing wrong with her weight. He just believed in conditioning, he told her. Engaging in self-discipline in all areas would see her through their objective. Personally, she thought he just didn’t want to find out what would happen if they both got drunk again.

She sipped the cream from the top, wondering why Günter treated her like a military school cadet. She was supposed to be his doxy, not his blade. Why couldn’t he just lighten up? After he’d admitted having feelings for her she’d thought he’d relent a little—hadn’t realized he’d meant nothing would change for them sexually when he said he’d drive her as hard as, if not harder, than before.

Walking with her cocoa she window-shopped along Oxford’s cobbled streets. Decorated for Christmas, the quaint two-story buildings exuded a charm she hadn’t remembered from her childhood in London. When people had cooed over her lingering accent, she’d brushed them off as daft. England was cold and damp, with little central heating and a depressed lower class that frittered away meager earnings on drink. Looking around, she wondered where she’d come by such prejudice.

White lights and garlands framed shop windows with cheer. The butter-yellow stone buildings glowed warmly in the late-afternoon sunlight and she knew she’d made a good decision to take some time for herself. She’d been spending so much time around the MI-5 crew, it was driving her batty. All those men. All that testosterone. What she wouldn’t do for a nice, long bubble bath in a tub that didn’t have razor stubble lingering around the drain.

Tilting her neck to one side, she cracked the tension from her vertebrae then laughed. David did that all the time.

She sobered as she thought of her call to him from a disposable cell Günter had purchased and given to her with strict instructions. She was to quit her job and tell her brother not to look for her—she was all right. God, he must be frantic with worry by now. She’d seen in the papers that he’d postponed his tour and gone home to New York with Kyra.

Cradling her cocoa in mittened hands, she brushed away her gloomy thoughts and tried to enjoy what little freedom she’d managed to snatch in the past two weeks. Living in utilitarian conditions under veritable martial law, she’d conformed to every demand MI-5 and Günter made of her. But why?

The man was a martinet. He worked her until she had bruises on her bruises. For what? Not a scrap of praise when he knocked her down five times in a row with the same maneuver, and she managed to dodge him on the sixth go-round.

All he said was, “Don’t get cocky. You should have had that on the third try.”

Then he knocked her down again as she stared at him, triumph turning to sawdust in her mouth.

Rounding a corner near the uniquely round Radcliffe Camera building, she took in carved wooden doors sporting burnished brass pulls. Mythical forms and faces peered at her from buildings across the way. The Green Man stared out from one, while Pan—in two carvings meant to support the vestibule roof—played his pipes on either side.

The snow fell more thickly now and she ducked under the tiny shelter to look out over a wrought iron enclosed courtyard. Watching the sun slip behind medieval roofs of green tarnished copper and mossy slate, she knew if there was magic anywhere on earth, it was here.

A bell tower chimed five o’clock, reminding her that Günter probably searched for her. She sighed, knowing she’d have to face his wrath when she returned. He expected her to live like a soldier. React like a soldier. But she couldn’t. Not always. Especially not with him.

Heavy-hearted, she dragged her boots in the snow, knowing she faced a brutal training session for her disobedience.
Disobedience.
She snorted at the word. She was a grown woman who could look after herself—had done so quite well before one Günter Faust had brought chaos raining down around her.