You've Got Male (16 page)

“You’re lucky then,” she told him.

“Maybe,” he agreed.

“I’m betting your family wasn’t like mine, either,” she said.

“No,” he replied simply, returning to the one-word answers again.

“Then you’re lucky about that, too.”

He did turn around to look at her then, his expression cold. “My father died seven years ago,” he said. “I wouldn’t call that lucky.”

“I’m sorry, Dixon,” she said softly. “I didn’t know. Of course that wasn’t lucky.” And although she told herself not to pry, that everything in his voice and his posture told her that this was a subject best left alone, she heard herself asking, “How did he die?”

“He was murdered,” he said flatly. Before she had a chance to comment—not that she really had any idea what to say—he quickly added, “And that’s all I’m going to say about that.”

Translation,
Avery thought,
don’t push your luck.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, more quietly this time. But she forced herself not to repeat any of the questions circling in her head. Why had his father been murdered? Who had killed him? Had the killer been caught? Had it had anything to do with Dixon’s line of work? Did he blame himself for it?

Surely not, she told herself. Why would she even wonder about such a thing? Still, murder. That had to have compounded his grief over the loss of his father even more.

He said nothing more as he finished cooking, then evenly divided the omelet onto two plates, which he carried to a small butcher-block table in the far corner of the kitchen. Avery took a seat at one of the two ladder-back chairs beside it, then waited for Dixon to return—which he did, with an open beer for himself and a glass of milk for her.

“Beats the hell out of Cheetos,” he said as he set the glass down beside her plate.

She wanted to object, wanted to go to the fridge to find a soda or get up to brew a pot of coffee, but she made herself say with almost genuine-sounding gratitude, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he told her as he folded himself into the chair opposite her. “Now clean your plate, Peaches,” he added as he lifted his fork. “We’ve got a big night ahead of us.”

H
ER BEDROOM HAD CHANGED
a lot, Avery saw when she and Dixon pushed open the door an hour later. She supposed that shouldn’t surprise her. When a family banished one of its members, they naturally would want to exorcise that member’s spirit from the house, starting with that member’s bedroom. Still, she couldn’t help thinking this newer version of her bedroom was perfect for her. Because it was clearly a guest room now.

The earth tones provided a nice gender-free color scheme, and the furnishings were completely asexual—a sleigh bed, tallboy, armoire and dresser of mahogany. They housed a variety of unremarkable knickknacks, a few she recalled being stored in closets when she’d lived here. Likewise, the landscapes on the walls were some her mother had banished to the attic when Avery was a child, deeming them of too inferior quality to be displayed. So what her bedroom had become in her absence was a storage space for Nesbitt cast-offs that no one was supposed to see.

Oh. She’d been wrong. Her bedroom hadn’t changed after all.

“My father may have called it my room,” she told Dixon as he closed the door behind them, “but there’s nothing of me here anymore. My mother totally redecorated the place.”

“Gee, I can’t imagine why,” Dixon said wryly as he looked around. “I mean, a woman like her not appreciating a Che Guevara poster over the bed? What’s up with that?”

“Over the desk,” Avery told him.

He looked puzzled. “What?”

“My Che Guevara poster hung over my desk, not my bed.”

He narrowed his eyes at her, clearly trying to decide whether or not to believe her. “I was, uh…I was kidding about that, Avery.”

“Well, I’m not. Che Guevara was over there,” she said, pointing toward the far corner of the room. “Over my bed I had a poster of Ralph Nader. And on the closet door,” she added, turning in that direction, “I had Russell Means.”

“Oh, well. In that case, I
really
can’t imagine what your mother was thinking.”

“She’s a Republican,” Avery said.

She scanned the room again, shaking her head. “Man, there’s not one thing of me left in this entire house. I honestly didn’t realize until now just how much they hate me.”

“They don’t hate you, Avery,” Dixon said softly.

Somehow she managed a chuckle for that. But it was an anxious sound, not a happy one. “Oh, please. You saw what happened downstairs. You saw how they feel about me. They can barely look at me. They can’t even say my name.”

“They don’t hate you,” he said again. “They’re hurt, Avery. Not just because of what they think you did to them, but because of what they did to you. Give them time.”

She set her jaw firmly. “They’ve had ten years, Dixon,” she said.

“They need more.”

She said nothing in response to that, mostly because she wasn’t sure whether or not she wanted to give them—or herself—any more time. It had been ten years. And nothing had changed. The only reason she was here now was by government decree. And that had only come about because she’d gotten herself into trouble again. So there were a few more things that hadn’t changed: her inability to exercise good judgment when it came to men. And her inability to manage her anger when those men pissed her off. And her enormous talent at embarrassing her family with the results.

“Okay, so they redecorated,” Dixon said when she didn’t reply. “It’s nothing a little nitro and acetylene wouldn’t take care of.”

She chuckled again, and this time there was a touch of genuine good humor in the sound. “Thanks, Dixon,” she said.

“For what?”

“I don’t know. For trying to make me laugh. For helping me stave off a panic attack. For fixing me something to eat. For standing up to my family when I couldn’t do it myself. I appreciate it.”

He gazed at her in silence for a moment, started to speak, but was interrupted by a brief knock at the door. Without awaiting a reply Gillespie entered carrying two cases of what looked like computer equipment with him. More sat in the hallway outside.

While he and Dixon went to work unpacking it all, Avery returned to the kitchen for Skittles, and by the time everything was up and running, her room was looking more like her again. Not just because the cat immediately made herself at home on the bed, curling against one pillow into the bowling-ball shape she preferred for serious sleeping, but because some of what the two agents unpacked belonged to Avery. They told her the OPUS geeks had even fixed it so that it would appear that she was connecting from her Central Park condo instead of her parents’ house in the Hamptons. Adrian would have no way of knowing anything was amiss.

But although she searched all of Andrew’s old haunts—even the distasteful pop-culture chat rooms where he’d gone slumming for morons—he seemed to be nowhere. Either he was checking in late tonight or he wasn’t going to check in at all. Nor did she have e-mail from him, which wasn’t really unusual, but neither was it normal. Still, he’d been the last one to send something, so she was the one who owed mail to him. It did made her uneasy, though, that she couldn’t find him. Though it might simply be the fact that she was working with Dixon on such an assignment to begin with that made her feel that way.

By midnight, the time when Avery was usually just getting into her groove, she felt like nodding off. And that was saying something for a chronic insomniac. “You know,” she told Dixon as she pushed her glasses up onto her head and rubbed her eyes, “I always figured spy work wasn’t as glamorous as they made it out to be in James Bond movies, but I figured it would be at least a little more exciting than watching my fingernails grow.”

She was sitting on an overstuffed ottoman in front of her computer, which she’d placed on one of the nightstands—strangely her mother had decided a desk chair would be out of place in a room that had no desk. Dixon sat on the floor, leaning against the bed, where he was leafing through the contents of a fat file folder. “Sometimes it’s actually more exciting than a James Bond movie,” he said. “But more often it’s like this.”

“So what made you want to become a spy?” she asked.

“What can I say?” he told her, still reading. “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve dreamed about traveling around the world and catching bad guys and decoding secret messages and working with high-tech gizmos and drinking martinis shaken-not-stirred and being shot at and camping out in frigid surveillance vans and posing as a grocery-store delivery boy and getting the shit kicked out of me by women half my size with whom I’ve tried to be perfectly reasonable.”

Oh, no,
she thought. He wasn’t going to slip in that comment about being shot at and then divert her attention with that last remark about herself. She’d apologized enough. “You’ve been shot at?”

“Yeah, I’ve been shot at. More than once, as a matter of fact.”

“Wow,” she said with much understatement. “Have you ever as a matter of fact been hit?”

“Yeah.”

“More than once?”

“Hey, believe me, once was enough.”

“Where were you hit?”

That finally made him look up. “Why do you care?”

“I don’t know. I just…” She stopped herself before finishing the statement. Not because she didn’t know what she wanted to say. But because she realized then that it was precisely because she
did
care. About him. About a guy who had forcibly entered her home and scared the hell out of her. A guy who had jerked her into a dangerous situation that she had no business being a part of. A guy who could be abrasive, overbearing, cocky and completely full of himself.

A guy who’d fixed her one for the road before she’d even asked. A guy who’d held her hand when she confronted her family. A guy who’d cooked her dinner when no one else had even asked—or cared—if she wanted something to eat. A guy who had promised no harm would come to her during her participation in this…whatever the hell it was.

“I don’t know,” she said again, even though she suddenly knew perfectly well. “Prurient interest, I guess.”

But he still didn’t answer her question, only turned his head to look at the computer screen in front of her, as if he found it infinitely more interesting than he found her. Which, of course, he did. Because that computer was hooked up, however intricately and however ephemerally, to the person he wanted most in the world to find. So Avery turned back to look at the monitor, too, telling herself she was more interested in its connection to Adrian Padgett than she was in Dixon’s answer. Because once they found Adrian and once they caught him, she would be free of this insane task and free of Dixon—and the confusing feelings she was beginning to have for him—for good. Then she could go back to her miserable little life and be happy.

“In the shoulder,” she heard him say from behind her. “I was shot in the shoulder once.”

She turned to look at him again, but he was still gazing at the computer screen. “Left or right?” she asked.

“Left.”

Her gaze fell to that part of his body, which, thanks to where he was seated, was nearly touching her own thigh. “When did it happen?” she asked.

“About four years ago.” But he continued to look at the monitor, not Avery.

“Do you have a scar?”

“Yes.”

“Does it still bother you?”

“Sometimes.”

“Did they catch the guy who shot you?”

“No.”

“Do you know who it was?”

“No.”

Although she told herself she knew better than to ask, Avery went for broke and said, “Will you tell me your real name?”

“No.” The word came swiftly, quietly and with complete conviction.

“Oh,” she replied in a very small voice.

He spared a quick glance at her face, then returned his attention to the monitor. “Look, it’s nothing personal,” he said in the clipped, indifferent tone of voice he’d used when interrogating her the day before.

“Yeah, I know,” she said dispassionately. “It’s totally professional. You can’t tell me your real name because it could jeopardize your identity and the security of your mission, yada yada yada. Whatever the hell that mission is. Other than bugging the hell outta me, I mean.”

“No, it’s not even professional,” he told her, still not looking at her. “I just don’t tell anyone my name, that’s all. The only people who know it are the ones who are very, very close to me.”

“You actually let people get close to you?” she asked, not quite able to mask the sarcasm that tinted the question.

He looked at her again, narrowing his eyes at her. Those eyes that were such a strange icy shade of green. But instead of going cold at the sight, Avery suddenly felt heat rushing through her body. God, he was so gorgeous. How could a man who looked like that be in the sort of profession he was in? She would have thought they’d want someone ordinary-looking and nondescript for a job like his, so that no one would be able to remember seeing him. One look at Dixon and you’d never forget a single detail. He was just that well put together.

“Well, if you won’t tell me your real name,” she said, assuring herself her voice did
not
suddenly sound shallow and thready, “then will you at least tell me your code name?”

“No.” The word came even more swiftly, even more quietly and with even more conviction than before.

“Why not?” she demanded. “Gillespie told me his code name. And I’ve heard you call him Cowboy since we arrived.” Though, for the first time it occurred to her that Gillespie had never addressed Dixon by any name other than Dixon. Despite that, she added, “Everybody in your stupid organization seems to call each other by their stupid code names. Why won’t you tell me yours?”

“Because nobody who learns my code name lives to talk about it,” he said plainly.

Her eyebrows shot up at that. “Because you’re so deep undercover and it’s so top secret that they can’t afford to let word get out?”

“No, because I beat the hell out of anybody who says it.”

Now Avery narrowed her eyes in confusion. “Um, why?”

“I have my reasons.”

She wanted to ask what they were, but one look at his expression and she knew better. So instead she asked, “How do they decide what code name a person gets? I mean, if I were an OPUS agent, what would my code name be?”

He seemed to give that some serious thought. Finally with a grin, he said, “If I was naming you, I’d give you the code name Badger.”

“Badger?” she repeated distastefully. “Oh, come on. You can do better than that.”

He shook his head. “No, it would be Badger. The code name always has to have something to do with the personality or some character trait of the real person.”

“And you think I’m a badger?”

“Peaches, it’s what you do best.”

She made a haughty sound. “Then I’ll come up with my own name.” She, too, gave it some serious thought, then hit on exactly the right one. “Garbo,” she decided. “That’s what my code name would be.”

“How do you figure?”

“Because I vahnt to be aloooone,” she told him, hoping he’d get the not-so-subtle hint.

Now his smile became wry. “A gentle reminder, Peaches—you’ve been alone for the past decade.”