You've Got Male (19 page)

But then, she didn’t fear Tanner, she told herself. She didn’t. No, what she felt for him in that moment was infinitely more hazardous to her health than fear.

“Don’t push me, Carly,” he said softly. Evenly. Certainly. “I’m not one of your old guys who’ll be so grateful for a glimpse of skin or a flirty little smile that I’ll open my wallet and let you plunder at will. I have a different reaction to a woman’s skin and her smiles. And it doesn’t involve my wallet. Though there could be some opening and plundering.” He smiled wickedly. “If you’re lucky.”

Her heart rate doubled at that, but she gave her head a careless toss—at least she hoped it was careless—and muttered as nonchalantly as she could, “Oh, get over your bad self already.” But the words came out quiet and breathless and in no way confident.

His smile broadened, and he dipped his head closer still. Close enough that she could see a faint rim of dark green circling the blue of his irises, close enough that she could smell the clean chlorine scent of him, close enough that she could feel his body heat radiating against her. Even more softly and certainly than before he said, “I don’t think I’m the one who needs to get over my bad self, sweetheart.”

And for that, more than anything else, Carly decided he was going to have to die. Slowly and painfully. Preferably by her hand. Bad enough she was responding to this little upstart the way she was. Worse that he was so aware of her condition.

“You’re nuts,” she said. “If there’s anything
I
need to get over, it’s your flaming great ego.”

He chuckled. “Yeah, well, takes one to know one, doesn’t it?”

She ignored the comment and told herself to move away from him, to dive into the pool and swim off the strange restlessness that had come over her this morning. For some reason, though, she couldn’t make herself move. Her body hummed where he touched her, even with the fabric of her bathing suit hindering any skin-to-skin contact. And although a good inch separated them, she could almost feel the vibration of his heartbeat slamming against her own. Not trusting herself to move away from him, Carly remained rooted in place.

He loosened his grip on her waist but didn’t release her. Nor did he withdraw so much as a millimeter. “Look,” he said, “trust me when I tell you that I’m no happier to be here than you are to have me. So maybe we should just both stay out of each other’s way while I’m here. What do you say?”

She started to tell him she was
not
going to have him and would be delighted to stay out of his way but quickly changed her mind. For the first time in her life Carly felt almost evenly matched by a man. Almost. And she honestly wasn’t sure what to do about it. Where she had initially found Tanner Gillespie to be an annoying little boy toy, now she was beginning to think he might be something more. She just wasn’t sure what yet. All she knew was that she was having a reaction to him unlike any she’d had to another man, and she was curious to see how it would play out.

Probably nothing would come of it. He didn’t seem to like her any more than she liked him. But maybe, just maybe, the next couple of weeks wouldn’t be as irritating or cumbersome as she’d first thought. A younger man might offer an interesting diversion for a woman like her. He might even know a few things men her age or older didn’t.

A girl could hope, after all.

When she didn’t immediately reply to his question, the hands holding her waist clenched tighter again. Though whether Tanner was thinking about pulling her close to kiss her or chuck her into the pool, Carly couldn’t have said. When she looked at his face again, she realized he didn’t know what he wanted to do, either.

Interesting. Very interesting.

Since he didn’t seem to know what to do next—poor boy—she decided to do it for him. Cupping her own hands over the ones he still held at her waist, she pushed herself upward until she was nose to nose with him. “Am I supposed to be afraid of you, Gillespie?” She easily removed his hands from her waist and shoved them back down to his sides, where they stayed. “A man who can’t even find the best parts of a woman who’s dressed in a way that should show him exactly where to look? Call me crazy, but I’m not impressed.”

And with that, she spun around and made her way to the edge of the pool and dived in. As she broke through the water and began to freestyle her way to the other end, she didn’t spare another look—or another thought—for Tanner Gillespie.

She didn’t need to. One thing she’d learned after two decades of dealing with men—young or old, experienced or not, they were all essentially the same. They were driven by one thing and one thing only—their cocks. And Carly Nesbitt was an excellent driver.

Tanner Gillespie was going to be a pushover.

T
ANNER WATCHED AS
C
ARLY
Nesbitt strode away from him, shaking his head at the picture she created. Damn. She’d looked downright luscious in skintight leather and clingy black, but in a screaming-red swimsuit…mmm, mmm good. To be really crass about it and reduce her to a food metaphor. Which he had a habit of doing with especially luscious women. So sue him.

He wasn’t surprised when she didn’t spare him a second glance—or thought. Women like her were totally predictable. Utterly sure of themselves and their ample charms, certain they were God’s gift to men. And, it went without saying, they were right. Like any gift, though, Tanner wasn’t about to decline the offer. He only wished he didn’t have to do this on her turf, since that put him at a bit of a disadvantage. The über-wealthy had too many polite-society rules to follow, and Tanner was only familiar with the one about not chewing with your mouth open. A woman like Carly Nesbitt, who’d been pampered and spoiled and coddled from birth, could learn a thing or two about real life in the place where Tanner grew up.

Ah, well. He was a man accustomed to adapting. And he was a fast learner. Lucky for Carly, he was a fast teacher, too. She had no idea what she was in for.

But he couldn’t wait to show her.

F
OR THREE DAYS AND NIGHTS
following the first there was no contact from Sorcerer, nor were Dixon and Avery able to locate him online. Dixon noted that Avery reverted to her usual habit of sleeping during the day, though he couldn’t have said whether that was because of their late hours on the computer or simply because she wanted to avoid her family as much as she could. He suspected it was the latter. Not that he blamed her. He slept during the day, too. Cowboy kept opposite hours, monitoring the equipment in his room during the day, looking for signs of Sorcerer from the lists of handles he used and chat rooms he frequented that Avery had supplied OPUS. But the other agent didn’t have any more luck than she and Dixon had. It was as if Sorcerer had disappeared from the planet—or perhaps had discovered somehow that they were looking for him.

Either way, he stayed quiet. And Dixon did his best not to show his concern that this assignment might wind up being one big bust. Avery was more upbeat, certain there was a reasonable explanation for Sorcerer’s absence. By that fourth night, however, Dixon could tell she was becoming a little anxious, too.

So, as had become their habit, they spent much of the evening engaged in some semitense banter to stave off the monotony. Though Dixon made sure the banter was light and insubstantial. He still didn’t know what had possessed him to share as much of himself with Avery as he had that first night, why he’d told her about his father. He
never
talked about that. With
any
one. He’d tried to tell himself it was a lack of sleep and the strangeness of the assignment, but he’d finally had to admit that there was just something in Avery that sparked something in him he wasn’t used to feeling. And he did his best not to think about it.

But every night when he saw her, something inside him just…opened up. He couldn’t think of any other way to describe it. It was as if a part of him opened to greet her. To invite her inside. To visit with her. Be with her. It was the damnedest thing. But the feeling was with him whenever he was near her.

Like now.

Only now it was stronger. Because where she was seated as she always was—on the ottoman in front of her computer—he had moved from his usual position on the floor to sit immediately behind her, in an effort to watch what she was doing. He was as close to her as he’d ever been, save that delirious night in her home when he’d been forced to pin her to the couch. Because she preferred to work in the dark and because he sat so close, he could see the bluish light of the monitor reflecting off her little black glasses and her long black hair, woven—as it had been since her arrival at her parents’ house—into a single braid that tumbled down the center of her back to nearly her waist.

As was her habit, she wore clothes that were maddeningly loose and unfeminine, heavy socks, grubby blue jeans and an oversize plaid flannel shirt. And Dixon didn’t want to think about why that bothered him so much—aside from the fact that it mirrored his own clothing exactly. What he wouldn’t have given to see her just once looking like a woman. He called himself every manner of sexist for thinking that way—not to mention stupid—but there it was all the same.

What he noticed more than anything about her, though, was that intoxicating peachy scent of her, an aroma whose origin he had yet to identify but which continued to drive him crazy. It made no sense. He’d been with women who smelled of the most expensive perfumes, women who wore ridiculously fluffy lingerie, women who celebrated their femaleness with the most feminine clothing money could buy. Yet it was Avery Nesbitt, brainy tomboy computer geek, who was front and center in his thoughts lately.

Obviously the boredom was making him crazy.

Tonight the lack of activity seemed to frustrate Avery even more than it did him. Of course, it might not be Sorcerer’s lack of activity that was bothering her the most. Her family had been exceptionally annoying over the past few days. Dixon had witnessed enough aberrant familial behavior by now to send Freud himself into a push-up bra and thong underwear. Dinners especially had been a Nesbitt psychosis fest. Happily Desmond V and his wife had only been present for one, otherwise Dixon would have had to listen to yet another tug-of-war over the guesthouse and numerous other family possessions.

But even without the brother present, Carly Nesbitt always seemed to find someone to spar with—though Gillespie seemed to be her favorite for that. Not that Dixon didn’t understand, because he found the guy to be pretty irritating, too. Nevertheless, he supposed he should be grateful he and Gillespie—not to mention Avery—were even included in the family dinners. He’d half expected to have to stay in his room while Jensen the butler brought him a TV tray filled with tepid water and scraps of bread.

Mostly the Nesbitts continued to pretend Avery wasn’t there. And through it all, Avery remained stoic, even passive. Truth be told, her response annoyed Dixon even more than the family’s behavior did. She never fought back. She never showed any reaction to the things they said—or didn’t say—or the way they treated her. She just pretended there was nothing wrong with the situation as it was.

What had happened to the woman who had popped him in the nose that night at her apartment? Where was the kicking and the screaming, metaphorical if not literal? Where was her defiance? Her damned spirit? It was as if walking into this house had stripped her of everything that made her Avery.

Except at night, he amended now, when she was trying to lure out the man who had played her for a fool. On those occasions, the dauntless, crafty, spirited Avery came into her own.

And Dixon told himself it didn’t bother him that she exhibited more life when she was dealing with Sorcerer than she did with him. He told himself he preferred it that way. She should care more about Sorcerer than she cared about him. Because Sorcerer was the one she needed to draw out, not Dixon.

“He’s here.”

Avery’s two very softly spoken words yanked Dixon out of his thoughts and into the action—where he needed to be, where he preferred to be. He snapped forward in his chair until his face was immediately beside hers, nearly touching her.

“Where?” he asked.

“He’s signed in as Mad2Live. It’s his favorite handle. He’s making it easy for me to find him. But right now I’m signed in under a name he won’t recognize as me.”

“Then he doesn’t know you’re watching him,” Dixon said.

“No, he doesn’t. But he knows I use other handles for my work that he wouldn’t recognize. So he could suspect I’m online. He’ll e-mail me at an address I sent to him alone if he wants me to meet him. Or he’ll hope I’m watching for him and IM him.”

“Check your mail at that address,” Dixon told her. “Don’t contact him with whoever you’re being right now.”

She signed out and in again under another name. The little flag on her cyber mailbox popped up, punctuated by a cheery female voice announcing, “You’ve got mail!”

“Coochie and Snookypie,” he muttered incredulously when he recognized their two names from earlier e-mail exchanges he’d intercepted between the two of them. “You know, for two intelligent people, you and Sorcerer sure are weird.”

“Welcome to the world of cyberdating,” Avery said. “There’s a lovely anonymity here that allows you to say and do things and even
be
things you might not otherwise say or do or be.”

“Like a twenty-six-year-old guitarist/songwriter/ poet/animal-rights activist and Libertarian party member named Andrew Paddington,” Dixon said, knowing that was the phony persona Sorcerer had presented to Avery.

“Yeah,” she replied quietly. “Like that.”

He read over her shoulder the e-mail she opened from the phony songwriter Andrew Paddington and the genuine bastard Adrian Padgett. But there was nothing helpful in it, only a brief announcement that he’d been out of town, touring with his band and trying to make a few bucks to cover rent, but he’d be online tonight if Coochie—
Coochie?
Dixon still couldn’t jibe her as such—wanted to hook up.

No sooner had he read the sig line, however—a quote from Jack Kerouac designed to make the poster of said quote look anticonsumer in a capitalist world, so ironic in light of the fact that Sorcerer wanted to consume the entire world—an IM window popped up with a message in red text from Mad2Live that said, Hi, Coochie!

Dixon feared he might be genuinely sick, but fortunately Avery kept her Snookypies to herself. Because she only typed a blue-lettered response that said, Hey, you. Where’ve you been?

There was a momentary pause at Sorcerer’s end for typing, then another line appeared in the IM box: I could ask you the same thing. Where have YOU been?

“What do I do?” she whispered, her voice edged with alarm.

“Answer him,” Dixon told her, keeping his voice calm, even though heat had coiled in his stomach and blood was surging through his veins.

“Oh, right,” Avery said. “Tell him that I’ve been out of touch because I was arrested?”

“You weren’t arrested,” Dixon told her.

“The hell I wasn’t.”

“Now is not the time,” he said, his voice edged with warning.

“Then what am I supposed to tell him?” she hissed.

She was beginning to panic, and that was the last thing they needed right now. So he extended his arms around her, reaching for the keyboard, and began to type himself.

I’m sorry, he wrote. I’ve had a lot of work this week.

You work too much, came Sorcerer’s reply.

His arms still around Avery, Dixon typed, It was a job I got at the last minute. Client needed it finished right away. It’s consumed my life for the past five days.

Can you chat now? Sorcerer wrote next.

Sure, Dixon typed back.

Avery was filled with dread when she saw the question Andrew—or rather Adrian—asked, and the way Dixon answered it without consulting her first. She just hoped this “chat” he wanted would be one of their innocent exchanges that touched on the events of their daily lives and didn’t turn into one of the steamy interludes she had once enjoyed so much they could bring her to the brink of orgasm. And not just because it would sicken her to have to pretend to be turned on by a man who’d been lying to and misleading her, either. The last thing she wanted was to end up in the virtual bedroom with Andrew/Adrian while Dixon was looking over her shoulder, close enough that she could feel his warm breath on the back of her neck and smell the clean soapy fragrance of him. His arms skimmed along the length of hers as he typed and his shoulders brushed her back. If she leaned even the tiniest bit to one side, she could rub her cheek against his and see if his skin was as warm and rough as it looked.

Oh, yeah. She really needed to avoid any kind of sexual encounter with Andrew—Adrian, she corrected herself—online tonight. Because it would be way too easy to take it off-line with Dixon instead.

“What now?” he asked when Adrian said nothing more.

“We go to our room,” she said.

“You have a chat room for the two of you?”

Avery nodded as she pushed Dixon’s hands away from the keyboard to type in the URL. Adrian was already there waiting for her when she signed in. They began with the usual catching up, each filling in the other on what had been happening during their time apart. Only this time Avery knew they were both lying. Adrian, as Andrew, told her about driving to Pittsburgh and Cincinnati and Louisville and Nashville to play some gigs and how great it was to be back in Philadelphia again.

Dixon had told her Adrian was living in New York City, and Avery had wondered since then just how close he may have gotten to her, physically. Did he know where she lived? Had he visited her building? She told herself he couldn’t know her whereabouts because she had too many security precautions in place. But Dixon had found her. Maybe not easily, but he had. Could Adrian have located her, too?

It didn’t bear thinking about. Because if Adrian knew where she lived, and if he’d scoped out her place, he might have known she was being surveilled even before she found out about it herself. He might know she’d been taken into custody. He might know she was working in concert with the agency trying to bring him down. And if he knew all that, and she drew him out, and he came looking for her or for Dixon…

I have nothing to fear in this moment,
she told herself as panic splashed into her belly.
In this moment I have nothing to fear….

“Avery.” Dixon’s voice sounded softly in her right ear, punctuated by his warm breath on her neck. “You need to answer him.”

She looked at the screen and saw what Adrian had typed most recently: I want you, Coochie. Tell me you want me, too.

Oh, God,
she thought. He wanted sex. This man who was a total stranger to her. This man who was corrupt and vicious and dangerous. He wanted her to tell him how much she needed him. How much she wanted him. How much she loved him. While Dixon was looking on.

“I can’t do this,” she whispered roughly, dropping her hands from the keyboard. “I just can’t.”

“You have to,” Dixon told her. “He’s expecting it. He’ll get suspicious if you don’t.”

“I can’t,” she said again. “I can’t pretend I’m turned on by him and I can’t make love, even virtually, to a stranger.”