You've Got Male (31 page)

True enough, Dixon thought. The only reason he hadn’t had a problem with that himself was because of his father’s history with the organization. His father had been alienated from his own family and hadn’t met Dixon’s mother until he’d been an OPUS operative for nearly a decade. Since Dixon was a legacy, they’d taken him on.

Lila’s voice grew a little louder and more animated when she started talking again. “But OPUS learned about all of it during their background check. They knew who my father and sister were and where they lived. They had the address, Binky.
And they never told me about either one of them.
”

“How do you know?” he asked. “Have they confirmed this?”

“Yes!” she said. “When I confronted them, they said they didn’t tell me because it would have made me a weaker agent. They figured what I didn’t know couldn’t hurt me—or anyone else.”

Dixon didn’t know what to say. Certainly he would have been shocked to learn he had a family at this point in his life. But Lila had never seemed like the type who would care about something like that. In fact, she’d often made little jesting comments about Dixon’s own apron strings and his ties that bind. Lila was a tough broad.
Hearth
and
home
weren’t part of her vocabulary. At least he hadn’t thought they were.

“I’m still not sure what this has to do with your abandonment of your OPUS responsibilities or your appearance here tonight.”

“I didn’t abandon my OPUS responsibilities,” she said coolly. “You know me better than to even suggest something like that.”

“I didn’t mean it like—”

“You know, you’re just like them,” she said before he could finish. “You gave yourself over to them completely after your father was killed. They own your soul.”

“No, they don’t.”
Not anymore,
he added to himself.

And only then did he realize that Lila’s accusation was true. Or at least it had been true. He really had given himself over to OPUS after his father’s murder. He’d devoted every moment of every day to finding out what had gone wrong with his father’s last assignment and who had been responsible for his cover being blown. Once he’d discovered it was Adrian Padgett who’d leaked the information, he’d known he wouldn’t sleep until he found the guy and ripped him limb from limb. Even on those sporadic visits home to see his family, Dixon had spent his time missing his father and seeing how his death had affected his mother, and reaffirming his conviction that he would find his father’s killer and wreak vengeance upon him. OPUS had become his only means of doing that. So OPUS had become his life.

Until Avery.

He wasn’t sure when or how the change had come about, couldn’t pinpoint now the moment he’d stopped living his life solely to avenge his father’s death and had started letting her creep into it. But at some point over the past couple of weeks she had more than crept into his life. She had become part of it. That night the two of them had made love so explosively had been unlike anything Dixon had ever experienced. He’d told himself at the time it was only because the sex had been so spontaneous, so hot and so raw. But now he knew better. Now he knew it was because he’d already started to care about her on some level other than the superficial. And it was in a way he hadn’t cared about women he’d known far better than she. Or at least whom he’d
thought
he knew far better than she. There had been something about Avery from that first night onward that had connected to something inside him he hadn’t even realized needed connection.

All along he’d been telling himself he only cared about her because she was his means to an end. But now he understood it was because he’d felt so alone. And being with her, he’d stopped feeling that way.

“You’re still just like them,” Lila said, pulling him out of his epiphany and bringing him back to the matter at hand.

Dixon shook his head adamantly. “No, I’m not. Not anymore.”

“Then try to understand,” Lila told him. “I have a family, Binky. You know what that means, to have people in the world who are connected to you that way, who care about you that way. I’ve never had that. But I had the chance to learn what it was like, a chance that was taken away from me right after I was born. A chance I might have found a second time. But OPUS took it from me again. Had it been up to them, I never would have found out about my father or sister. But they wanted me to be a better agent. So they never told me.”

Dixon thought about that for a minute. About how he would feel if he’d been denied the chance to know his father and mother and sister. And only because someone had thought it would make him do his job better to be kept in solitary confinement for the rest of his life. Because by preventing him from feeling an emotion like love, they would make him a more effectively operating piece of machinery. A piece of machinery they needed in order to make their own jobs a little easier.

Yeah, okay, so that sucked.

“I still don’t know what any of this has to do with your disappearance and the reports that you’ve gone rogue and tried to kill the Big Guy and—”

“That’s bullshit,” Lila said. “Pure and simple. I didn’t try to kill anyone. And I haven’t gone rogue. I’ve gone AWOL.”

Dixon arched his eyebrows. “And the difference would be…?”

“Going rogue means going over to the other side or out for my own purposes.”

“And you’re out for what—a sandwich?”

She managed a smile for that, but it didn’t last long. “I just want to find my sister and father,” she said. “And they won’t tell me where they are. I even tried to blackmail them into telling me.”

“Oh, great,” Dixon said. “The last time anyone tried to blackmail them, people ended up dead.” His own father among them.

“I didn’t do it the way Sorcerer did,” she said. “I have information about him, a few vital little tidbits OPUS needs if they want to find him. And it’s stuff I haven’t told anyone yet.” She hesitated only a moment before revealing, “Not even you, Binky. Not because I didn’t trust you,” she hastened to add when he opened his mouth to object. “But because I couldn’t get it to you at the time. But I won’t tell you now, either. I told OPUS I wouldn’t reveal what I know until they tell me where my family is. They refuse. They said any records they had of their existence were expunged the minute they realized I didn’t know about them.”

“Which is almost certainly true,” Dixon said.

“I know,” she agreed. “But the reason they won’t tell me anything is more likely because I pissed them off. You know how they are.”

“I do,” Dixon agreed. If there was one thing OPUS hated more than anything it was not having the upper hand. Lila had it now. Which meant they’d act like a big baby and make up stories about her, and if you were her friend, you weren’t their friend and you couldn’t have any cookies, either, so there. “And
you
know,” he countered, “that it can be very dangerous to piss OPUS off.”

She lifted up the hand wearing the handcuff bracelet. “Yeah, I know even better now than I did before.”

“And what’s with that anyway?” Dixon asked, dipping his head toward the handcuff. “Not to mention your new wardrobe. You’ve never been one for uniforms.”

“One wears what one has available,” she said. “Especially if what one was wearing previously was extremely identifiable.”

“And that’s not?” Dixon asked.

“Well, it’s a little less conspicuous than the bunny suit,” she said.

“Easter Bunny or just generic bunny?”

“Playboy Bunny,” she told him. “I had a tip about the Vegas Playboy Club.”

Oh, Dixon would have given up every nickel of his retirement, his Keogh
and
his 401(k) to have seen Lila operating in a place like that.

“This,” she added, sweeping both hands down over her attire, “and this,” she said, holding up the handcuff again, “came about when the tip turned out to be a bogus one fed to me by an OPUS operative previously unbeknownst to me in an effort to bring me in.”

“Let me guess,” Dixon said. “The operative in question was the one who went in instead—probably in a body bag.”

“Stretcher,” Lila told him. “Not that I didn’t try.”

“I don’t think I want to know the details.”

“You’re right. I let down my guard because of my state of mind. That won’t happen again.”

“But then, we were talking about this missing twin sister,” Dixon said, getting them back on track again. Even if what they were back on track with was a runaway train.

“I’m going to have to find her by myself now,” Lila said. She met his gaze levelly. “Or with a little help from my friends.”

“You don’t have any friends, Lila,” Dixon reminded her. He would have grinned when he said it, but he wasn’t kidding. Of course, Lila knew that. Then he added, “Except me.” She knew that, too.

She nodded. “And you’re better at what you do than anyone. And part of what you do is find people.”

True enough, Dixon thought. There was just one problem. “They were telling you the truth when they said any record OPUS has of your family has been purged by now. If any record ever even existed to begin with. Do you have names?”

“Only the first ones,” she told him. “From the letters. Elliot for my father. Marnie for my sister.”

“Got any kind of geographical information?”

“Elliot’s letters mentioned Pennsylvania. I don’t know what city. There were no envelopes with return addresses or stamp cancellations or anything like that. But that was almost thirty years ago. They could be anywhere by now.”

Dixon expelled a sound that was at once energized and fatigued. “Well, at least they’re not common names. And at least Pennsylvania is a starting point. We might be able to dig something up.”

“We?” Lila echoed suspiciously. “Who’s we?”

Dixon hadn’t even realized he’d used the plural pronoun instead of the singular one. Funny that he’d begun to think in terms of him and Avery as a unit without even consciously making the decision to do so.

This time he did grin when he spoke. “No offense, Lila, but I have a new partner.”

“Yeah, I know. That little Cowboy upstart. Me, I thought his code name should be Teletubby.”

“No, not him,” Dixon said. And then his grin broadened. “Lila,” he said, “there’s a new woman in my life.”

H
E THOUGHT SHE WAS HEALED
.

As Avery sat in her bed two nights after her parents’ party, idly rubbing her fingers over the downy fur behind Skittles’s ear, she heard not the cat’s easy purring but Dixon’s words from Saturday evening.
Peaches, your scabs healed a long time ago. What you can’t seem to quit doing is showing off your scars.

How could he say that? How could he think she was healed? She was more damaged now than ever. She’d been living in the house where she’d grown up for two weeks, and her family was still barely speaking to her. Well, save Carly, she amended, who’d actually been kind of nice to her the past couple of days. But that was because of Tanner’s entry into her life, not Avery’s. And, okay, there had been that brief exchange with her father in the living room a few mornings ago that Avery still wasn’t sure she understood. That
could
have been an attempt to build that bridge she’d been hoping might materialize. And, yeah, there had been her father’s insistence, too, that she be at the party, which she supposed in its own weird way might have been an effort on his part to let the rest of East Hampton know she was back in his sort of good graces. Maybe…

Still, even if her family was coming around—and she still wasn’t convinced they were—it wasn’t because
she
was “healed.”

So what had Dixon meant?

She watched the Beziers screen saver as it tumbled leisurely across her computer monitor, its random curves changing from red to orange to yellow to green to blue. Staring at the elegant dance of color eased her tension some, and she was grateful for the scant light it provided to the otherwise darkened room. She hadn’t seen Dixon since the party. He’d left immediately after Gillespie’s arrival, and the two men had gone to the guesthouse to hook up to OPUS from Gillespie’s equipment and find out what was going on with his missing partner. His missing partner who was obviously more to him than a co-worker. Avery just wished she could figure out what.

Where was he? she wondered, turning her watch toward the computer to read the time by the screensaver light. He had said they would go back to work tonight, and he was always here by ten-thirty. Now it was after eleven. If she didn’t get online soon, Adrian was going to think she was a no-show and he might get suspicious. She still wasn’t sure he’d bought her multi-night absence of a couple of weeks ago. To have it happen again so soon would be a little unusual. Especially on a weekend, when regular business hours were over. He knew she never had anywhere to go on the weekends, when most people were out running around. He knew she did her running around on the Net.

Where was Dixon?

Maybe he’d fallen asleep, she thought. He and Gillespie had probably been working around the clock. He would have needed a nap or something before spending another night in front of the computer.