You've Got Male (32 page)

Oh, just go over and get him,
she told herself.
He’s right across the hall. It’s not like you were sent to your room without supper. You can go out anytime you want.

She laughed at that. Because she couldn’t go out anytime she wanted. Though maybe the fact that she’d even thought such a thing was a good sign. She had seemed to be managing her anxiety and panic attacks better since returning to her parents’ house. Which was odd, since it hadn’t been long ago that the mere thought of having to confront her family would have sent her over the edge.

Resigned to if not going out, at least going across the hall, Avery scuttled off the bed and made her way out. She was lifting her hand to knock on Dixon’s door when she heard voices on the other side. His first, then one she didn’t recognize. It was a woman’s voice, though—there was no mistaking that. Although the voices were too quiet for her to understand what was being said, there was an unmistakably intimate quality to them. And there was unmistakable affection, too.

Who could he be talking to? Especially this time of night? And how had whoever it was gotten as far as his room without Avery’s hearing her go by?

Spy stuff, she immediately realized. Whoever was in there was probably someone Dixon worked with. His partner, she thought. The woman who’d gone rogue and who was wanted by the very organization she was supposed to be working for. The woman Gillespie had said was armed and dangerous.

Avery wondered what she should do. Was Dixon in danger? What if his partner really was armed and dangerous? Of course, he’d seemed to find the suggestion ludicrous, but who knew about these spies? OPUS had already set one crazy agent loose on the world. Who was to say they hadn’t driven another one around the bend, too? Her mind surging, her heart pounding, Avery turned the knob and pushed the door open—

Just in time to see Dixon leaning forward to kiss a woman.

Okay, it was dark, so she couldn’t see that well. But moonlight filtering through the filmy curtains threw into stark profile two people—one man and one woman—who were touching each other intimately. Dixon had taken the woman’s hand and was lifting it for what looked very much like a kiss. Whoever she was, she was someone he knew well and someone for whom he cared deeply. Someone he knew better—and had known longer—than Avery.

“Dixon?”

His name was out of her mouth before she could stop it, and both he and the woman jerked their heads up to look at her. The woman started to bolt away, toward the window, but Dixon held her wrist firmly in his hand, and she halted. Avery waited to see if she would struggle, but she didn’t. Judging by her posture, though, she was in no way comfortable at having been discovered.

“Avery,” Dixon said, his voice low and tinged with apprehension.

Avery took a step forward, then stopped. “What’s going on? Who’s that woman?” she asked. And she hated herself for sounding like a jealous wife who’d just walked in on her philandering husband.

“Go back to your room,” Dixon told her. “I’ll explain later.”

She started to march into the room with the indignant demand that no, he would explain right this instant, but halted herself. He wasn’t her husband. He wasn’t even her lover. Yes, they’d had sex. Yes, they’d shared parts of themselves with each other that went beyond the physical. But she had no claim on him whatsoever. They were two people who’d been thrown temporarily into close quarters by extraordinary circumstances. But they owed each other nothing.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. I just—”

Oh, God. Now she sounded worse than an angry wife. Now she sounded like a heartbroken schoolgirl. But she’d been a heartbroken schoolgirl, she reminded herself. And it hadn’t felt anything like this. This was worse than anything she’d felt before.

“Never mind,” she quickly amended as she stepped back into the hallway and began to pull the door closed.

But Dixon was there before she could complete the action, tugging it open again. “Oh, no you don’t,” he said. “You’re not leaving here thinking what you’re thinking.”

“I’m not thinking anything,” she said.

“The hell you’re not.”

“Oliver.”

His name came not from Avery’s mouth but from the other woman’s. And it was the name she knew he shared with very few people.

“I don’t have a lot of time here,” the woman added impatiently. “I need to get lost. Can you take care of this or not?”

The woman lifted her hand again, and now Avery saw what looked like handcuffs dangling from her wrist. Whoa. Evidently she’d not only interrupted something here, she’d interrupted something really weird.

“I need bolt cutters,” Dixon said.

Way
weird, Avery thought. Way, way weirder than anything she’d ever heard about. And that was saying something, since she had e-mail addresses she used specifically to solicit spam for her work. But of all the S-and-M subject headers she’d read on porn spam, none had ever mentioned bolt cutters.

“I really need to get out of here,” she said softly. “You guys are into something I don’t want to know about.”

The woman on the other side of the room expelled a sound of disgust. “Listen, Strawberry Shortcake, no one’s mind is in the gutter here but yours.” Then to Dixon she said, “This is her? This is the one you were telling me about?”

“This is her,” Dixon said.

He’d told his partner-slash-possibly-weird-handcuff/ bolt-cutter-thing-lover about her? Avery thought. Did that mean he thought she was special enough to tell someone about? Or did it just mean he was into those three-way-handcuff/bolt-cutter S-and-M things? And then she finally processed what the other woman had called her.

“Strawberry Shortcake?”
she echoed indignantly. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? What, you can’t come up with something more creative than that? I can think of a million things to call you right now.”

Even in the moonlight she saw the woman smile. “Oh, okay,” she said. “I see it now. For a minute there, Oliver, I was worried about you.” And then, before Avery could say another word, the smile fell and she added, “Hello? Bolt cutters? Please?”

Dixon turned to Avery, but before he could say a word, she told him, “I have no idea if there are any bolt cutters around here. If anyone would know, it would be Jensen.”

“Who would doubtless get suspicious if we asked him for some.”

This time Avery was the one to smile. She still had no idea what was going on. Somehow, though, she didn’t feel quite as bad as she had when she first entered. Dixon had some explaining to do. But for the first time since meeting him Avery began to think maybe he would answer most of the questions she asked. Now if only she could figure out what to ask him….

She shook the thought off. For now. “Jensen wouldn’t get suspicious if I were the one doing the asking,” she said.

Dixon’s mouth hitched up on one side, too. “Peaches, I knew I could count on you.”

N
OT UNTIL ALMOST AN HOUR
after She-Wolf’s departure was Dixon finally able to make himself relax. Not that he wasn’t confident she could slip off unnoticed or take care of herself should someone discover her. But her appearance had put him on heightened security, and it always took him a little while to come down from that. He wasn’t sure, though, why he’d gone on heightened security in the first place. It wasn’t as though She-Wolf had been doing anything tonight she hadn’t done a million times before. In fact, her coming to the Nesbitt estate to ask him for help and then leaving after getting it was pretty tame compared to most of the assignments she’d completed effortlessly and without consequence in the past. Ever since he’d sent Avery off in search of bolt cutters, though, Dixon’s adrenaline had been pumping like an oil refinery.

Once he made that association, he understood. When Avery became involved, he had begun to feel fear. If Dixon had been caught helping She-Wolf, he would have been in a boatload of trouble, might have ended up behind bars with her. But that wasn’t what scared him. That was part of the job.
His
job. Not Avery’s. Had she been caught, she would have been in a boatload of trouble, too, might have ended up in prison again, one way or another. Hell, worst-case scenario, if things had gone wrong tonight, there could have been gunfire. Dixon and She-Wolf were trained to handle it. Avery wasn’t. She might have been caught in the middle of it. She might have been hurt. Or worse.

And Dixon would have been responsible.

But as he watched her fire up her computer and take her seat before it as she had every night, he realized he’d been putting her in danger since the assignment began simply by pulling her into it. And now he was insisting she meet Sorcerer—a man even their best trained agents hadn’t been able to capture—face-to-face. Of course, had it been up to Dixon, she never would have left her Central Park condo. But he was going along with instructions to ensure she made contact. He might have offered up some meager objection when his most superior superior had mapped out the plan, but he hadn’t fought much. He tried to reassure himself with the reminder that at that point, Avery had been a stranger to him. He hadn’t felt about her then the way he did now.

So just how
do
you feel about her now?
he asked himself. And it bugged the hell out of him that he couldn’t come up with an answer. Or maybe he just didn’t want to come up with an answer. Which bugged the hell out of him even more.

“I’ve got mail,” Avery said. “From Adrian.”

Dixon leaned forward in his seat to read over her shoulder and, as always, was assailed by the fresh, luscious scent of her. Instead of asking her about her e-mail, he instead heard himself say, “What makes you smell like peaches, Peaches?”

She turned to look at him, obviously startled by the question. “Lotion,” she told him. “Is that why you call me that?”

He nodded.

She studied him in silence for a moment, her dark brows knit downward. Then, “Oh,” she said softly, and turned back to look at the monitor.

Dixon wasn’t sure what to say after that, so he leaned forward again—to see the monitor, naturally—and was again assailed by the intoxicating scent of her. Unable to help himself, he inhaled deeply, holding the breath inside him for as long as he could, until dizziness finally made him exhale. But even when he breathed normally, he was surrounded by her fragrance. And even when he breathed normally, he felt dizzy.

“He wants me to meet him Tuesday,” she said.

“At the club where his alleged band is supposedly playing?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“He must have been convinced then,” Dixon said. “He must have believed you when you told him you couldn’t meet him in a public place. This is good. He’s buying it.”

She turned around again and met his gaze, her eyes brimming with something that looked very much like fear. “Don’t be so sure,” she said softly.

“Why not?”

“Because he wants to meet me at Rockefeller Plaza. At lunchtime. When the place will be crawling with people.”

Dixon muttered a ripe curse. “What’s the e-mail say?” But even as Avery started speaking, he looked past her to read along.

Sorcerer started off with his usual platitudes, telling Avery how much he missed her when they weren’t together, then segued into the events of his day, most of which seemed to consist of working at a music store and teaching guitar to kids who didn’t even recognize names like Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Greg Allman and Robert Johnson.

“Who’s Robert Johnson?” Dixon asked.

“Only the greatest blues guitarist of all time, according to Andrew. I mean, Adrian.”

“I never knew Adrian was into the guitar thing.”

“Yeah, well, obviously when he scams someone, he does his homework first,” she said flatly.

Which, of course, was exactly like Sorcerer, Dixon thought.

He read more of the e-mail, afraid to skim it, though there was nothing of significance until he came to the final paragraph.

I know you’re scared to go out,
he had written,
and I know you don’t give out your address to anyone. But it might be a while before I get back to NY. We’ve known each other for more than a month now. You mean a lot to me, Avery. A lot. If I mean anything to you, couldn’t we just meet? Please? Rockefeller Center’s cool this time of year….

There was more cajoling, more assurances of her importance to him, more wheedling, more sweet talk, more con.

“Why wouldn’t he press to meet you at your place?” Dixon asked, thinking Sorcerer’s insistence on meeting out in the open when he knew Avery was agoraphobic felt wrong somehow. “If he were going to try and convince you to get together with him, especially if he knows you’re agoraphobic, why would he add to your anxiety like that? Why wouldn’t he be trying to talk you into letting him come to your apartment?”

There was actually a very good answer to that question, Dixon knew. He just didn’t want to think it was the right one. If Sorcerer was on to them, he’d want to draw Avery out where he could see her from a distance, to pick out anyone in the surrounding crowd who might also be watching their meeting. If he was on to them, he’d know that going to her apartment could easily be walking into a trap. But how could he possibly know Avery was working with OPUS? They’d done everything they could to cover their tracks, and Dixon was confident that even Sorcerer wouldn’t be able to figure out what was going on. This had to be a legitimate request for a meeting on his part. It had to be a genuine attempt to meet Avery and pull her into whatever little intrigue he was hatching. But even then, why wouldn’t he want to come to her place?

Avery had an answer for the question that Dixon liked better than his own. “I made a big deal early in our relationship about how I don’t give out my address to
any
one I meet online, no matter what,” she said, stressing it the same way Sorcerer had in his e-mail. “If I could get away with not giving it out to
any
one anywhere else either, I would. I’m a total privacy freak,” she explained. “Unfortunately, my…condition…makes it necessary for me to give the information to a select few.”

“Mohammed at Eastern Star Earth-Friendly Market, for instance,” Dixon said.

She nodded. “Yeah, and look how that turned out.”

He said nothing in response to that.

“I have features in place on my PC that make it virtually impossible for anyone to find me, even ordering online as I do.”

“Yeah, I know,” he muttered, remembering her homemade firewall.

“Even if Adrian really was Andrew Paddington, aspiring musician who truly loved me,” she continued, “it would take a long time for me to trust him enough to tell him where I am. Even if it meant not meeting him face-to-face. But that was part of why I…liked him…so much,” she added. “Because he knew all that about me and he was still patient enough to put up with it. He was going to wait for me as long as it took for me to get comfortable with him.”

“No, he wasn’t,” Dixon reminded her unnecessarily.

“I know that now,” she said so softly he almost didn’t hear her. Then, just as they had the night before, her eyes began to fill with tears. And as before, she spun around quickly so Dixon couldn’t see them.

This time, though, he understood. Avery Nesbitt, who was so whack no man in his right mind could possibly want her, had finally met a man who wanted her. And then she’d discovered that he’d been lying to her all along, that he didn’t want her at all.

But she was wrong. There was a man who wanted Avery Nesbitt. Dixon wanted Avery Nesbitt. He just couldn’t have her, that was all. Because the kind of work he did was too erratic and nomadic—and too dangerous—for a woman who couldn’t stray far from home. If he got involved with her and someone decided to use his…affection…for her against him, she’d be a sitting duck. Firewall or no firewall.

Before he realized what he was doing, Dixon lifted a hand and began to move it toward her hair, to the black silky tresses she wore unfettered since having it cut. He stopped himself before touching her, though, curling up his fingers and returning his hand to his lap. It was pointless, he told himself. Yeah, maybe he cared more for Avery than he let himself admit, and maybe he’d overstepped boundaries both professional
and
personal since meeting her. But he was back inside those lines now, where he was supposed to be, where he intended to stay. This thing with Avery, whatever it was, couldn’t go any further. In a matter of days they’d be saying their goodbyes. There was no reason to make it any more difficult than it would already be.

“I don’t think it’s weird that Adrian would be asking me to meet him somewhere other than my apartment,” she said now, once again pulling Dixon out of thoughts he’d rather not be having—funny how he kept going there anyway. “He knows better than to ask for an invitation to my home. And if he doesn’t meet me at my home, and since I told him I wouldn’t come to the club, that leaves somewhere away from both.”

“Meaning somewhere out in public.”

Her back still turned to him, she nodded. “And in New York City, public is really, really public.”

“Good point.”

Dixon still didn’t like it. It still felt wrong. He was about to say so, but a chime from the computer signaled Adrian’s arrival online and a pop-up window in the corner announced an IM from him to Avery. Hey, Babe, it said. What’s the forecast for Tuesday?

“What do you want me to do?” Avery asked, turning to look over her shoulder at Dixon.

Kiss me,
he thought before he could stop himself.
Touch me. Make love with me. Spend the night at my side. Wake up with me in the morning and then go someplace with me where no one will ever find us. Be happy. Be yourself. Be with me. Forever.

“Reel him in,” he said instead, his voice gritty and low. “Do it slowly. Don’t spook him. But reel him in, Avery. It’s time to put Sorcerer in the tank, where he belongs.”

A
DRIAN COULDN’T HAVE CHOSEN
a better venue for their rendezvous. For
himself,
Avery thought as she focused every last iota of her person on not turning into a frothing-at-the-mouth wacko. This was the first time in nearly a decade that she’d been out in the open this way without first getting herself three sheets to the wind. Their meeting time was still five minutes away and she was already nearing meltdown.

All around her, people scurried to and fro, carrying brightly colored shopping bags full of early holiday gifts or armed with briefcases and backpacks that were essential to their everyday living. The Rockefeller Plaza Christmas tree soared up behind her, glittering in its elegant holiday finery, even though Thanksgiving was still more than a week away. Skaters glided past her through silvery, softly falling snow, a never-ending kaleidoscope of dappled sweaters and Polartec. Tony Bennett sang to her that she should have herself a merry little Christmas, accompanied by a street vendor hawking hot cider nearby, close enough that Avery could inhale the faint aroma of apple and cinnamon and clove.

On the next bench, a little girl was lacing up her skates, two long black braids tumbling from beneath her fuzzy white hat, her short pink skirt and sweater indicating she was serious about the icy pursuit. A man who was clearly her father sat beside her tying his own skates, and the two of them were engaged in animated, intimate conversation. As one, they began to laugh at something the man had said, then they stood hand in hand and headed for the rink. A slice of envy knifed through Avery at the sight, so she made herself look away. And she tried not to panic when she realized how exposed she was in the crowd of people. And how very, very alone.

Truly, everything around her would be enchanting, she knew, had she not been so terrified of everything around her.

She closed her eyes and clutched with both hands what to the casual observer appeared to be a covered venti latte but which was in fact a quadruple scotch on the rocks. Hopefully those three sheets to the wind weren’t far off. Dixon had at first nixed the liquor, telling her it was essential her mind be clear for this endeavor. She’d countered that without the liquor she’d be a doddering lunatic. She agreed with him that she needed to find another way to combat her panic attacks and work toward good mental health. Assuming, of course, she still had something remotely resembling mental health once this assignment was over. Until then, she thanked God for the almighty Glenlivet.