You've Got Male (4 page)

Amazing all the dangerous things that would fit easily into a man’s jacket pocket, she marveled. Though somehow she suspected his hands would be the most dangerous weapon of all.

He was starting to look menacing again, and it occurred to her how truly isolated she was in her life. She didn’t know any of her neighbors and honestly wasn’t sure if any of them would respond to an anguished cry in the night. Not that they’d even hear an anguished cry this time of night, because they were probably all asleep, as normal people were at four-something in the morning.

And if something terrible
did
happen to her, who would she turn to in the fallout? Avery hadn’t spoken to anyone in her family for nearly a decade, and she didn’t kid herself that something like an assault or molestation on her part would change that. On the contrary, were her person to be violated, it would just make the rest of the family that much more determined to avoid her. The Nesbitts of East Hampton were still trying to rebuild their social standing in the wake of their youngest child’s exploits. She doubted they’d even send flowers to her funeral.

Her mouth went dry at the thought of her funeral. Or maybe it was because her visitor came to a halt in front of her with scarcely a breath of air separating them. If he did decide to be menacing instead of majestic, he could easily overpower her and no one would be the wiser.

Oh, who was she kidding? He could choose to be majestic, too, and she’d still end up a puddle of ruined womanhood at his feet.

Her heart was hammering hard in her chest again, but surprisingly it wasn’t because she felt threatened by him. No, what Avery was feeling was infinitely more dangerous and more potent than fear. What she was feeling was hunger, plain and simple. And it wasn’t for the bags of groceries this guy had just delivered. It was for an altogether different sort of package that he had.

Without thinking, she dropped her gaze to the package in question and saw that his jeans hugged him there as intimately as they did elsewhere. And it was a very nice package indeed. When she realized what she was doing, she snatched her gaze back up again, forcing herself to look at his face. But he was smiling at her in a way that told her he knew exactly what she’d been looking at. Worse, he knew she liked what she saw.

“Thanks again,” she said as she pulled the front door open and moved behind it. But the words came out sounding breathless and needy and in no way grateful.

“Anytime,” he told her as he took a few steps forward. But he halted at the threshold and turned to look at her one last time. Then he lifted a hand to his forehead in something of a salute and smiled at her. “And, sweetheart, I do mean
any
time,” he said before leaving.

Avery slammed the door closed behind him with no attempt to be subtle about it, thrusting all four dead bolts into place as quickly as she could and hooking the chain back tight. Then she leaned against it, her arms thrown wide over it, as if her too-slim, one-hundred-and-twenty-pound body could actually hold back two hundred towering pounds of solidly packed male.

Strangely, though, she hadn’t taken those precautions because she feared he might come back and ravish her. It was because she was afraid she’d run after him and beg for it.

S
HE SMELLED LIKE PEACHES
.

That was the thought circling with the most frequency around Dixon’s brain thirty minutes after meeting Avery Nesbitt in the flesh. Not the fact that her attire was the sort of thing normally worn by people who’d sustained a severe head trauma. Nor that she hadn’t had a qualm about inviting a total stranger into her apartment, never mind that the stranger was carrying groceries she’d ordered—hell, any Tom, Dixon or Harry could have slipped the real delivery boy a Benjamin out on the street and intercepted those groceries to gain entry into her apartment for nefarious purposes. Nor had Dixon been thinking about what a major slob she was. Or about how she’d actually seemed kind of nice, taking pity on the clumsy delivery boy the way she had and cleaning up the guy’s mess.

He wasn’t even thinking most about how, judging by the collection of letters and numbers and symbols he’d seen on her laptop screen, she was trying to take over the world. No, what Dixon was thinking about most was that Avery Nesbitt smelled like peaches.

And, hey, she might not have been trying to take over the
entire
world. Maybe what she was working on up there was just a sinister little hobby of hers, something she’d keep to herself and not unleash on an unsuspecting planet.

But she was building a monster up there.

And not one of those lame rubber-suited monsters that stomps all over Tokyo, either. No, the beast Avery was building could potentially wipe out life as they knew it from Alaska to Zambia.

Damn, she really
was
good, he thought as he sat in the darkened van and reviewed the episode in her apartment one more time. And now he could really see why Sorcerer wanted to hook up with her. If not sexually—there was still that small matter of her wardrobe—then certainly in a way that was even more useful to Sorcerer.

Dixon hadn’t been able to see a lot of what was on the laptop before he’d heard her approaching the dining room and knocked the papers to the floor in an effort to hide his snooping. But even the quick glimpse he’d been able to steal had told him a lot. What Avery Nesbitt was doing in the privacy of her own home was something that could potentially have worldwide repercussions. Because Avery Nesbitt was creating a virus. Not some cute little virus that spread from person to person with a simple
achoo,
but a fast-traveling and highly contagious computer virus that could wipe out any PC it came into contact with.

Even from the little Dixon had seen, there was nothing to rival it. Unless he sat down to dissect and analyze it, he wasn’t sure there would be a cure for it. He’d practically fallen in love with her on the spot, so massive was his admiration for her skill. Until he’d remembered that she was a menace to society, wherein his ardor had quickly cooled.

But it had risen to the fore again during that last odd exchange they’d shared just before he’d left her apartment. Okay, so she wasn’t what any man in his right mind would call beautiful. In those ridiculous pajama bottoms and that shapeless sweatshirt, he hadn’t been able to discern a single feminine attribute. Although she appeared to have a thick, glossy mane of blue-black hair, she’d been wearing it in a style he hadn’t seen on any female over the age of twelve. And she’d seemed to select her glasses frames for the sole purpose of birth control. But the eyes behind those glasses…

Oh, baby.

Huge and round and bluer than the sky above. And hungry. They’d been hungry eyes and they’d raked over Dixon as if he were a surf and turf carried to a death-row inmate the night before her execution. He’d nearly burst into flame when she’d looked at him the way she had. It had been all he could do not to respond to that look, just to see if maybe peaches were as sweet in the dead of winter as they were during the torrid heat of summer. One touch, he’d figured. That was all it would have taken. If he’d touched her one time, the right way, in the right place, Avery Nesbitt would have been his for the night.

Because damn, Dixon was good, too.

He figured she would need at least another day to finish what she was working on, and even then he really did have no evidence to suggest she was planning to put it into circulation. Could be she just had a really bizarre, twisted hobby building computer viruses and then sitting back to admire them.

But he doubted it.

In his experience, people who made viruses only did so for one reason: to send them out into the world and laugh hysterically at all the damage they wrought. And if Avery Nesbitt was involved with Sorcerer, that only made the threat ten times more menacing.

So Dixon had less than a day to find out everything he could about Avery Nesbitt and do whatever he had to do to stop her. He wasn’t going to waste a moment of it hanging around outside her apartment building doing surveillance. Not when he’d learned enough about her tonight to uncover
everything
about her. But he needed to be at OPUS to do that, with
his
computer and
his
networks and
his
contacts.

He climbed into the front of the van and turned the key and thought again about the peachy scent of Avery Nesbitt. Then he threw the vehicle into gear and drove away. He glanced once into the rearview mirror as he waited for a signal at the corner to change, at the pale blue glow from a computer screen that was barely visible in the window of what he now knew was Avery Nesbitt’s dining room.

She was still at work on her monster. And Dixon was quite possibly the only human being who knew how to stop her.

I
T WAS PAST HIS LUNCH
hour when he finally took a break, if for no other reason than that he needed to refuel before taking his findings to his superior or he’d get woozy from sheer exhilaration. If Dixon didn’t get a major promotion out of this—to nothing less than Exalted Supreme Sovereign of Every Damned Thing There Is—then there was no justice in the world.

Avery Nesbitt was going to be quite a catch.

And Dixon was going to be the one to catch her.

His head swam with his findings as he blindly selected food from the company cafeteria and paid for it. The headquarters for the Office of Political Unity and Security were in Washington, D.C., but the organization had field offices in a handful of major cities: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Miami. Dixon normally worked out of D.C., but his search for Sorcerer had taken him and his partner She-Wolf to a half-dozen cities in the past year. He was no stranger to New York, though, having earned his master’s degree from Columbia University. Nevertheless, he’d had little opportunity to enjoy himself since his return.

Yeah, he was going to enjoy bringing in Avery Nesbitt for questioning, even if he had to bring her in kicking and screaming.

As he ate his lunch without tasting a bite of it, Dixon connected and divided and reconnected all his discoveries in his brain. She was a fascinating piece of work. But as much as he’d learned about her over the past several hours, he still couldn’t get to the core of her—her motivation. Everybody was motivated by something. Something that had happened to them, or something that they wanted or something that they needed. Motivation defined who a person was. Dixon was no different. He understood his motivation perfectly. But Avery Nesbitt…

He couldn’t figure her out.

There had to be a reason for why she had done the things she’d done and there had to be a reason for why she lived the way she did now—which was an odd way to live indeed. But there was nothing in her background that even hinted at what motivated her. It had only made her that much more intriguing to Dixon.

Pushing his tray away with the plate still half-full, he rose and returned to his office to gather up his notes and printouts. He reviewed them one last time to make sure he was prepared, then took the elevator down to the basement, to the office of his most superior superior, the One Whose Name Nobody Dared Say—mostly because Dixon didn’t know what his name was. OPUS was, after all, a top-secret organization within a top-secret organization, and everything everyone knew was strictly on a need-to-know basis. But very few knew who needed to know what, including Dixon. There were times when he wondered if the One Whose Name Nobody Dared Say even knew what his own name was.

Usually No-Name stayed nameless in Washington, D.C., since that was where the most superior superiors of OPUS dwelled. But since Sorcerer had been spied in New York, Mr. No-Name had been spending a lot of his time here with the senior agent of the New York office, Another One Whose Name Nobody Dared Say Because Nobody Knew What It Was Either. Or, as Dixon liked to think of her,
Ms.
No-Name.

Right now, though, he was going to go straight to the top, to the Big Guy himself. He was greeted by Mr. No-Name’s secretary, an efficient-looking, white-haired woman dressed in gray flannel, whose name Dixon also didn’t know—did she even know the Big Guy’s name?—and politely requested an audience with the Great and Powerful Oz. She glanced at her appointment calendar, picked up the phone, murmured a few words into it, then smiled.

“He says you can go right in,” she told Dixon before pressing her finger to a buzzer under the desk.

Dixon smiled in return as he passed her, knowing her own warm, outgoing demeanor was strictly for show. If she was like half the secretaries at OPUS, in addition to having a top-secret button under her top-secret desk that opened top-secret doors, she also had a bazooka under there. Maybe a flamethrower. Or even a surface-to-air missile. And, like the other secretaries there, she wasn’t afraid to use it and probably had on more than one occasion.

“Sir,” Dixon greeted the man sitting behind the big government-issue desk as he entered.

Mr. No-Name was about as remarkable as an insurance claims adjuster would be, wearing a boring gray suit, a boring white shirt and a boring blue tie. His hair was thinning a bit, but no more than that of any other man his age—which Dixon gauged to be somewhere between forty and sixty. In fact, his boss looked like just about every man between the ages of forty and sixty. And he doubtless worked hard at looking average. It wasn’t good to stand out when you were a big muckety-muck in a top-secret, bazooka-toting-secretaried organization.