Dare Me (2 page)

“Only if you have access to the house.”

Macy knew she’d regret her next move, but she had no
choice.  She had a mission to complete.  She couldn’t allow her pent-up
feelings toward Dante to keep her from achieving her objective.

“So let’s deal,” she offered.

He leaned back into a Georgian antique library chair, the
winged back surrounding him like the tall neck of a vampirish cape.  She should
have been immune to his mysterious allure by now.  Not that his charisma mattered. 
As long as she had the spirit of a good fight in her bones, she’d remain safe
from his magnetic pull.

“I’d hoped you’d want to bargain,” he said.  “In fact, I
have a proposal I believe you’ll find quite tempting.”

God, she was going to regret this.  “Let’s hear it.”

He folded his hands together and steepled his long fingers. 
She couldn’t fight the tiny chill chasing up her spine.

“I’ll allow you access to any and all rooms in the house,
one at a time, over the course of the next week.  I’ll clear all Arm agents
from the premises.  Your work will be entirely secure.  If you find the code,
you can take the sequence back to the consortium, though I will insist that the
Arm receive a duplicate code in case the industrialists do not work in the best
interest of the United States.”

Macy was a lot of things, but gullible wasn’t one of them.

“What’s the catch?”

He grinned and his eyes slanted into a stare that was
nothing short of predatory.  “I want you.”

“Excuse me?”

He stood and crossed the room in three smooth steps.  On
instinct, Macy drew her gun, just in time to press the barrel against the taut
muscles of his stomach.  The force of the steel against his vulnerable flesh
didn’t seem to faze him one iota.

In fact, he looked down at her with amusement dancing in his
gray eyes.  “Need I say it twice, love?  I want you, and if you wish to search
my house, I intend to have you.  In any and all ways possible.”

If he’d had any sense all, Dante would have worn his Kevlar
this morning.  As the luridness of his offer slowly seeped into Macy’s brain,
the jab of the gun against his gut increased.  If she was any other woman and
he’d made the same sexual offer, he wouldn’t have entertained even an inkling
of fear that he’d be turned down, much less that he’d be shot for his audacity.

But he wasn’t dealing with
any
other woman.  Macy
Rush not only had motive, and now opportunity, to kill him, she had enough
justification to warrant an immediate acquittal from any court in the land.

“Offer denied,” she said, her words seething through her
teeth.  “Try again.”

He shifted his position, but Macy simply shoved the gun
further into his flesh.  He’d ordered his men to leave him and Macy alone.  They
wouldn’t disobey until shots were fired—which would be too late for him at that
point, but at least the house wouldn’t fall into the hands of T-45.

Not that he was worried.  The terrorists who’d made the
threat reportedly didn’t have the manpower to bring their plan to fruition.  Of
course, most international anarchists did not reveal their true intentions or
capabilities to their potential targets.  He couldn’t afford to underestimate
them—not with so much at stake.

Still, time was on his side.  Both the Arm and T-45, he
knew, had dispatched teams to thwart the terrorists on the ground.  And with
Macy looking for the code, he figured he’d have the crucial combination in a
matter of days—if it even existed.  He could afford to hitch the mission on his
own personal agenda.

He couldn’t change the past, but the future was ripe for the
taking.

Just like Macy.

Boldly, he pressed closer so that her breasts crushed
against his chest.  The old fire they’d once shared instantly sparked.  He
could see the attraction in her crystal blue eyes.  He could feel the lust in
the stiffening of his sex.

“My offer stands, Macy.  I want you back.  Truth be told, I
never wanted you to leave.”

“Then you shouldn’t have betrayed me.”

“I can explain that.”

He didn’t bother to try, though.  Even before her eyes
narrowed with keen disbelief, he knew Macy wasn’t ready to listen.  Any
explanation he offered now would fall on ears deafened by anger and righteous
indignation—reactions he’d expected, anticipated, even planned for.  If he had
to choose from the full range of Macy’s fiery emotions, anger wouldn’t have
been his first choice to deal with—but it sure as hell beat indifference.

“You’ve had ten years to create an elaborate explanation for
your actions, Dante.  I can only imagine what spin you’ve come up with.  But I
don’t want to hear excuses.  Not now.  Not ever.  I’m only interested in
finding the code.”

He leaned slightly forward, so that his breath teased her
wispy red bangs.  “I’m offering you the chance to find the code with virtually
no interference from the Arm.  All you have to do is let me make love to you.”

Without warning, Macy pocketed her gun and stepped away. 
She shrugged her jacket closed, but not before he noticed the tell-tale peak of
her nipples through her smoky blue silk blouse.  The sight evoked a surge
through his blood that heightened his confidence and libido.  Yes, he wanted
her.  That much he’d known.  But she wanted him, too—whether she liked it or
not.

Chemistry was a powerful thing.

“You’re becoming sloppy in your old age, Dante, allowing
personal desires to interfere with a mission.”

Dante shrugged nonchalantly, but his eyes remained trained
on Macy as she stalked around the room.  She’d already begun her search.

“Actually, the economy of my plan is quite impressive, since
I’ll accomplish two crucial goals at one time.  It’s win-win.”

Macy speared him with a spiteful glare.  “You think it’s
impressive to hinge the success of our mission on me having sex with you?”

He grinned.  “Flowers and poetry don’t move you, my love. 
They never have.  But dangle the carrot of another successful mission in front
of you and you can’t resist.”

Macy pressed her lips tightly together and from inside the
pockets of her jacket, he could see her fists straining against the leather. 
Like him, Macy was a professional liar.  She could fool the best that the
world’s intelligence agencies offered.  But so could he.  Even from the
beginning, they’d learned that lying to each other was a complete waste of
time.  He’d managed to feed her a mistruth only once since he’d known her—and
that decision had cost him her love.

Love he was determined to get back.

“Macy, you must admit,” he continued.  “I’ve taken good care
of myself over the years.  I’m not unattractive.  I can’t imagine you’d
consider sleeping with me such a huge sacrifice.”

She arched a dark red brow.  “Are you so hard up?”

“No, just hard.”

“That’s crass,” she sniped.

“No, that’s honest.”

Without response, she stepped into the foyer, moving around
the partitioning wall so she could see fully into the house—and escape his
close scrutiny.  From the street, the cottage appeared relatively small, though
he had no doubt she’d studied the blueprints during her mission prep.  But now
that she was finally inside, she would recognize the impressive scope of the
layout.  The nooks and crannies built into the walls—the overflow of antiques
that filled nearly every space.

On his orders, nothing had been removed from the house and
every piece of bric-a-brac had been x-rayed, examined, catalogued and then
returned to its original home.  Even the precise arrangements of the
knick-knacks, chairs, settees and claw-footed tables had been studied for
patterns that could lead them to the code.

But so far, the Arm agents had come up empty.  The code,
likely a collection of letters, numbers and symbols, could literally be
anywhere in the house.

He followed Macy as she assessed the scope of her mission,
stopping when his groin nearly brushed against her backside.  He took a moment
to close his eyes and inhale the subtle scent of her perfume, a cool aroma
tinged with sharp lemon, refreshing mint and soothing chamomile.  When he
opened his eyes, he realized how close he’d leaned in.  His nose was less than
an inch from her hair.

He wanted her beyond reason.  At one time, he’d questioned
the depth of his need, even railed against the connection that floated only a
step below obsession.  But now, he accepted how his love simply ran deep and
that a man like him could stop at nothing until he won back the woman who owned
his heart.

“I refuse your offer,” she said coolly.

“You have no alternative.”

“I could kill you.”

“Then my men would kill you.  Neither the Arm nor T-45 would
have the code, all because you don’t want to face what we once had together.”

“What we once had died the day you betrayed me.” To her
credit, her voice remained steady and strong.

“Maybe.  Are you courageous enough to find out for sure?”

Macy glanced over her shoulder, her eyes narrow slits of
blue.  “I know for sure, the same way that I know I’ll find the code.”

She stepped away again and tapped her large stud earring.

“This is Rush, reporting in.”

As the agent monitoring her message replied, she brushed
past him.

“Patch me directly to Marshall,” she ordered.  “We have a
problem.”

* * *

The burn of his stare scorched the back of her neck, but
Macy refused to turn around.  She’d once thought Dante couldn’t be any more
arrogant and confident than he had been ten years ago when they’d first met—he
the master agent and she the rookie spy.  How wrong she’d been.  Now, she was
one of the most sought-after “finders” in the covert operations business, the
next in line to helm T-45, the quintessential elite spy organization envied by
everyone from the CIA to MI-5 and Mossad.  And yet, all he wanted was her in
his bed.

Well, he could have her goddamned body.  It was her heart he
truly wanted—and that he’d never possess.  Never again.

“Marshall, here.  Do you have the house?”

“Negative,” Macy answered.  “The Arm owns the property.  Has
for two weeks.”

“Why didn’t we know?”  Marshall asked.

Macy smirked.  “Even the Arm manages to cover their tracks
every once in a while.”

Abe Marshall voiced his annoyance with a series of
unintelligible grumblings.  None of the agents who worked for Abercrombie
Marshall ever admitted to understanding when their boss’s voice lowered to a
gruff mumble—likely because no one wanted to know what the man was saying.  He
was probably firing them all, and if they asked him to speak up, the dismissal
would become permanent.

“How many agents on-site?” he finally asked with clarity.

“Unknown.  Burke is here.  He’s doing the bargaining.”

“The Arm doesn’t negotiate with T-45.”

Macy pushed aside the sheers blocking the light from the
window.  Through the low-hanging branches from the century-old oak outside, she
spied her fellow T-45 agents.  Unfortunately, just a few steps away, disguised
quite effectively as a man painting a garden fence and another as a carpenter
repairing a broken shutter, were two Arm operatives.  A standoff between the
two organizations would clearly get them nowhere.

“Apparently, the Arm will negotiate today.  He’s offering me
full access to the house.  His agents have failed to find anything of use after
two weeks of searching.”

“Maybe there is nothing to find,” Abe offered.

Macy shook her head, her chest tightening.  For as long as she’d
been working with Abercrombie Marshall, he’d always shown the utmost confidence
in her instincts and her deductive skills.  She’d left the Arm—and Dante—because
neither the top dogs in the organization nor her lover trusted her as
implicitly as Abe.  And she’d never proved him wrong.  So why, after all this
time, did the sharp sting of even a logical question still remain?

“No,” she insisted, determined to shake the topsy-turvy
reaction to having Dante back in her presence, much less her life.  “I studied
Bogdanov’s journal and letters.  I’ve interviewed him myself.  The code is here.”

“Bogdanov is insane, Macy.”

This much was true.  Grigoriy Bogdanov, once the golden boy
of Soviet computer science, had been examined by T-45’s elite neurologists from
New York, London and Tokyo.  They all agreed that the man who had designed and
implemented the last computer system to operate the nuclear silos for the
Russian government suffered from an extremely aggressive form of dementia.  His
moments of clarity were few and far between, and no combination of medication
or therapy had been able to reverse the damage to his brain cells or coax the
healthy pathways of his mind to reveal the information only he possessed.

But Macy had refused to give up.  She’d spent a rigorous
week with Bogdanov after T-45  pulled him into protective custody from the
bucolic mental institution where his wife had stashed him—the very wife who’d
turned up dead just one day after the terrorists transmitted their first threat
to the Russian government.  Macy knew that further attempts to extract the code
from Bogdanov’s memory were impossible, but she also believed the man too
intelligent and too meticulous to store the crucial combination only in a
vulnerable human brain.  She knew the code existed.  She’d tracked the
likeliest location as the New Orleans house where he’d first retreated after
his defection.

Now, she simply had to work her way through the detritus of
an old man’s obsession with antiques in order to find it.

And to do that, she had to sleep with the man who’d once
broken her heart.

“Insanity seems to be running rampant around here,” she
answered.

Her boss chuckled.  Abercrombie Marshall had been with T-45
for as long as anyone in the business could remember.  Like her, he was an American
ex-patriot spy denied a chance to rise through the ranks of the intelligence community
in the United States—he because of his race, she on account of her tarnished
reputation, courtesy of Dante Burke.