You've Got Male (29 page)

She tried to inject a lightness she didn’t feel into her voice when she said, “Yeah, I know. I should just stop picking at my scabs and get over it, right?”

Dixon did smile then, shaking his head very slowly. “Peaches, your scabs healed a long time ago. What you can’t seem to quit doing is showing off your scars.”

She was about to ask him what he meant by that, but a man’s hand appeared on his shoulder. When Avery looked past it, she saw Tanner Gillespie talking instead. Next to him stood Carly, with her arm looped affectionately through his. And there was a faint smudge of lipstick near his mouth that was the exact same color as hers.

Well, my, my, my. Wasn’t it just a big night for revelations? Suddenly Avery understood why her sister had softened up so much over the past few days.

“I’ve been looking for you all night,” Tanner told Dixon, his voice tight, his expression grim. “You need to phone home,” he added. “Now.”

Dixon went rigid at the announcement. “What’s up?”

“It’s She-Wolf,” Tanner said.

“She-Wolf?” Avery and Dixon said as one. Avery because the two words confused her, but Dixon obviously recognized them well.

“Who’s She-Wolf?” Avery asked further, swiveling her gaze between the two men.

“My partner,” Dixon said. But something in his voice told Avery the woman was a lot more to him than that. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

Gillespie shook his head. “The Big Guy wouldn’t give me details. He only told me that you and I need to go to code black.”

“Code black?” Avery echoed, even more confused. Then she bit back a nervous giggle, suddenly feeling like a Bond girl, an idea that was too funny for words.

“I know,” Carly spoke up, reading her mind. “Doesn’t it make you feel
so
shaken-not-stirred? Like you just entered Casino Royale? I told Tanner we need code names, too, you and me.”

“I already have one,” Avery told her. In fact, she had two. But suddenly she was rather liking Dixon’s better than her own. She didn’t want to be Garbo anymore. She didn’t vahnt to be aloooooone. “I’m code name Badger,” she told her sister with a smile.

Carly chuckled. “It’s perfect. So who shall I be?”

“Do you
mind?
” Gillespie interjected tersely. “This is official business we’re on here.”

Carly made a face and waved a negligent hand at him, then looked at Avery again. “I’ll be code name Vixen. What do you think? I think that’s totally appropriate for me.”

“Keep it up,” Gillespie said, “and you’ll be code name Roadkill.”

“Look, folks, could we settle this code-name business later?” Dixon asked. “I need to know what’s happened to my partner.”

Avery’s lifted spirits sank again. She just wished she knew what else She-Wolf was to him.

“Like I said, you need to phone home,” Gillespie repeated.

“That means he needs to call headquarters,” Carly whispered loudly to Avery in a not-so-subtle aside. “Isn’t that cute? They even have code names for stuff like that. ‘Code black’ means they have to hide their whereabouts from everyone except the guy in charge.”

Black was also the color of the look Dixon threw Gillespie, Avery noted. “You’re telling a civilian our business?” he demanded.

Tanner’s arms flew out to his sides. “What can I say? She just has a way of making me do these things.”

Carly grinned smugly, then blew on her fingernails and buffed them on her little black dress. “Like I said. Vixen. I could be a real asset to your organization.” She leaned toward Avery and added in another one of those conspiratorial whispers, “I know Tanner’s real name, too.” Then, as Dixon looked horrified by the revelation—not that he had any right, Avery thought—Carly moved her fingers to her mouth, mimicked the locking of her lips with a tiny key, followed by the throwing away of said key and smiled with much satisfaction.

Dixon closed his eyes, shook his head slowly, then opened them again and fixed his gaze on Gillespie’s. “What’s She-Wolf got to do with our going to code black?” he asked, ignoring both women now.

Gillespie said nothing for a minute, as if he were afraid of what might happen when he said what he had to say. Finally, though, he said, “She-Wolf is missing.”

“Missing?” Dixon repeated incredulously. “How the hell can she be missing?”

“Actually it’s worse than missing,” Gillespie said. “According to the Big Guy, She-Wolf has gone rogue.”

“Rogue?” Dixon asked, even more incredulous than before.

Gillespie nodded. “Yeah, rogue. She’s armed, Dixon, and she’s dangerous. And OPUS is reasonably certain that she’s going to come looking for you.”

T
ANNER’S FAVORITE BAR IN
the whole wide world was buzzing with action, even on Sunday night at ten o’clock. The chunk of nondescript brick squatted on the corner of a fairly busy intersection in Queens, its blue-and-red-neon sign proclaiming it simply Ed’s. The place was exactly as it had been the first time he’d entered it almost four years ago, on his twenty-first birthday with his father so the old man could order Tanner his first—legal, anyway—beer. His younger brother Stu worked here as a bartender now, and his sister Lily was a waitress, so Sunday nights at Ed’s were almost like coming home.

So much for going to code black,
Tanner thought as he pushed open the door to the place for Carly to precede him through it. Instead of packing up their gear Saturday night, as they’d been instructed to do, Dixon had insisted he needed another twenty-four hours at least to take care of some business.

Tanner immediately had suspected that the business Dixon needed to take care of had nothing to do with their current assignment and everything to do with his rogue partner. His suspicion had become confirmation when Dixon told him to take the night off because he and Avery could manage without him. They could manage, Tanner thought, because they wouldn’t be looking for Sorcerer tonight. At least Dixon wouldn’t. Avery would doubtless sit alone in her room doing that thing she did to draw Sorcerer out, while Dixon manned the equipment in Tanner’s room, trawling for information about She-Wolf.

Tanner told himself he should be more concerned, that he’d probably be dragged down, too, if Dixon got caught disobeying orders. Somehow, though, he couldn’t bring himself to be too concerned. Like Dixon, he was confident there was more to She-Wolf’s situation than the Big Guy was letting on—operatives that good didn’t go bad that fast, and they’d offered no solid evidence that She-Wolf had committed any crimes. Dixon was a big boy. He knew what he was doing. And—for now, at least—Tanner was his partner, and partners watched each other’s backs. So he’d take tonight off and let Dixon do whatever he had to do. And, hey, who better to spend a night off with than Carly?

Although Ed’s hadn’t changed in the brief time Tanner had been away from the place, tonight he felt different coming here. For a minute he couldn’t put his finger on why. Then, with no small amount of astonishment, he realized he was nervous about bringing Carly here. But whether he was anxious about how she would see the place, or how the place would view her, he couldn’t have said.

Probably it was a combination of both. Bringing a girl to Ed’s was the closest Tanner came to bringing a girl home to meet Mom. What was strange was that Carly was the first woman Tanner had brought here. He’d met women here on a number of occasions—both for the first time and for a date. Once, on an especially drunken New Year’s Eve, he’d
had
a woman here, in a bathroom stall. But he’d never physically brought one with him before. And maybe that was causing some of his nervousness, too. That it would be Carly Nesbitt, of all people, he wanted to bring here was more than a little weird.

But since that night in the library, when he’d called her on the Lady Chatterley thing, the two of them had been enjoying quite the sexual alliance. To put it politely. What they’d really been enjoying was some of the downest and dirtiest and most incredible sex Tanner had ever had. Whether it was in her room or his, they’d spent not a single night apart. And there had been some afternoons and mornings they’d not spent apart, either. In fact, over the past week, he’d had more sex than he’d enjoyed during the previous six months. And he’d had it in places he never would have imagined a person could have sex. Frankly, he would never look at a grand piano the same way again.

The moment the door to Ed’s swung open, Tanner was hit by a blend of cigarette smoke, beer on tap, raucous laughter and raw guitar. As he followed Carly through the door, he tried to see the bar for the first time, the way she would. Fake wood paneling formed the walls on all sides that weren’t front window, and scarred red linoleum covered the floor—what you could see of the floor anyway. Neon signs for virtually every brand of beer—American only, thankyouverymuch—dotted the walls, and most of them, Tanner was impressed to see, were working at at least seventy-five percent. Ed had done some sprucing up.

The population of the bar was almost perfectly divided male and female, but most of the people present were couples. Ed’s wasn’t the kind of place where you usually went to meet people, Tanner’s own habits notwithstanding. It was the kind of place where you went to hang with friends you knew well. He’d wager Carly was the only one here tonight who hadn’t been here at least once before. It was a neighborhood pub, and the people who came here were neighbors. Certainly none of them was slumming from the Hamptons.

He hoped Carly wasn’t, either.

She’d overdressed for the place but not by a lot. Where most of the women wore jeans and sweaters and the guys were dressed in jeans and flannel, there were a few people who’d come from Sunday dress-up events of one kind or another and still wore nine-to-five type clothing. Ties were loose, of course, and heels discarded. But Carly, in her black leather skirt and bright blue cashmere sweater—okay, that could be a problem…if, you know, anyone actually recognized it as cashmere—didn’t stand out much. He’d anticipated her wardrobe selection, however, and had dressed to complement her so she wouldn’t feel out of place. Instead of his usual jeans and flannel, he’d donned gray cords and a navy blue sweater. Preppier than he liked, but what the hell.

The things he did for women. Man.

“Busy place,” she said over the din.

“Actually it’s just getting warmed up,” Tanner told her. “By midnight the joint will be jumping.”

“Even on a Sunday?”

“Even on a Sunday. People in my neighborhood don’t care if they feel like hell when they go to work on Monday, ’cause for most of them, that only improves the job.”

“Interesting,” she said, still not looking at him.

Though he couldn’t be sure if she was talking about the people or the place. But he was heartened by the fact that she didn’t make the comment scornfully or sarcastically. She was just stating a fact. He supposed a place like this and the people in it would be interesting to someone like her. He’d bet good money Carly Nesbitt had never stepped over a class line in her life. But from the Hamptons to Queens, she’d had to leap over quite a few. Blue blood versus blue-collar. Had to make for a combination that was, well, interesting.

“What are you drinking?” Tanner asked.

It was a rhetorical question, naturally. Ed would rather stick needles in his eyes than mix up something with a name like cosmopolitan or appletini. If a beverage wasn’t some shade of brown, you weren’t going to find it at Ed’s.

Carly opened her mouth to reply with what was probably her usual drink of choice, then, smart woman that she was, looked around the room and back at Tanner. “Just a shot in the dark, but I’ll bet I’m having a beer.”

He smiled and nodded. “Good choice. Got a brand in mind?”

She looked at the signs on the walls. “Oh, gee. Something domestic, I think.”

“You got it,” he told her.

He started to leave her where she was, then thought better of it. Already she had drawn some eyes. And not all of them male. Two of them belonged to Tanner’s sister Lily, who was making clear both her curiosity and criticism. He hadn’t told anyone in his family about Carly, of course. And until a few days ago, he hadn’t thought he would ever tell anyone about her. But Lily knew, like everyone else at Ed’s, that Tanner didn’t show up here with women on his arm. If he was with Carly now, it was a clear statement of intent. He just wished he knew what his intention was. Maybe he ought to ask Lily, since she seemed to know.

“Come with me,” he told Carly, curling his fingers over her wrist and pulling her close. “I don’t want you to get lost.”

She grinned. “Wow. That’s like totally opposite what you told me that first day we met.”

He grinned back, but circled her waist with his other arm as he propelled them carefully through the crowd. “Nah, you just weren’t listening that first day.”

“I was listening,” she told him. “But you were using a language I didn’t understand.”

He gave her a little squeeze. “Sweetheart, I would have thought you spoke body language better than anyone.”

She bumped her hip against his. “Well, you speak it in a dialect I never heard before.”

“And you’re not likely to hear it again, either,” he told her with supreme confidence.

“Rather sure of ourself, aren’t we?”

“We are.”

By now they had made it to the edge of the bar, and Tanner called out to the nearest bartender, a woman he’d known since second grade. “Brenda! Two dark drafts!”

“Comin’ right up, Scotty!” she replied as she reached overhead for two pilsners.

He cringed when he heard his real name shouted with such familiarity. Not because it had been a while since anyone had called him that, but because he’d always hated the name. No amount of insistence that people call him
Scott—
not
Scotty,
as he’d been called throughout childhood—had worked. To everyone in his neighborhood, he would always be Scotty. It was yet another reason why he’d wanted to join an organization that would provide him with a new identity.

“Scotty?”
Carly echoed from his side. “They actually call you
Scotty?
And you
let
them?”

“It’s a childhood nickname,” he muttered. “A term of endearment.”

“I like my term of endearment for you better,” she said, leaning in close to whisper that very term in his ear, arousing him on the spot.

“Call me that in front of my family,” he murmured back, “and my mother will wash your mouth out with soap.”

As Brenda filled the glasses with deep-amber brew, a half dozen other people at the bar greeted Tanner, including his brother Stu, who was working the far end. Tanner pointed him out to Carly, identifying their relationship, then indicated his sister Lily, who was making her way toward a nearby table with a tray full of drinks. When Stu saw his brother standing on the other side, though, he nodded to Brenda to switch places with him, and it was he who served up Tanner’s order.

At twenty-three, he was a darker, slightly shorter version of Tanner who had just started law school at Columbia. Tanner’s folks were incredibly proud. Not just of Stu but of all their kids. Lily was finishing up her last year at CUNY with a major in sociology, and Tanner’s sister Megan was embarking on her freshman year at Syracuse. Ginny and Tiff, the twins, were juniors in high school, but with their smarts, there were already colleges fighting to get them. Tanner’s generation was the first to make it to college, and the fact that they were all paying for it themselves—or with academic scholarships—only made the accomplishment that much greater.

When Stu saw Tanner turn to hand one beer to Carly, he smiled knowingly at his brother. But the smile fell when Carly turned fully around to accept the drink, and the temperature at the bar dipped a good fifty degrees.

Damn,
Tanner thought. Was it that obvious she was so far above him socially? And did it really matter that much if she was?

When Tanner slapped a ten onto the bar to pay for the drinks, Stu reached out ostensibly for the money but grabbed his brother’s wrist instead. Pulling Tanner close so he could speak low, Stu said, “Tell me you just met her and didn’t bring her here with you tonight.”

Tanner’s brows arrowed down at the distaste in his brother’s voice. “What if I did, Stu?” he asked, his voice edged with warning.

Stu dipped his head forward in acknowledgment. “Okay. Then tell me you didn’t bring her here because she’s special.”

Again Tanner was surprised by his brother’s obvious and immediate dislike of a woman to whom he hadn’t even said hello. Between Stu’s comments and Lily’s expression, Tanner figured he was two for two in the family disapproval rating.

All he said in reply, though, was, “Stu, have I ever brought a woman to Ed’s before?”

His brother shook his head.

“And is this not Sunday night, a night when I know that at least a third of my family will be here?”

This time Stu nodded.

“Do the math, Stu.”

His brother eyed him steadily for a moment, then said, “Can’t.”

“Why not?”

Stu met his gaze unflinchingly. “Doesn’t add up, dude.”

With that, Stu released him and withdrew, sliding the tenner with him. His expression was one of challenge, as if he were waiting to see what Tanner would do now that he’d made clear his disapproval of his big brother’s choice of women. In fact, the last time Stu had looked at Tanner like that, it was because he’d just taken the old man’s straight razor to the tires of Tanner’s Stingray when Tanner had gotten one for Christmas and Stu hadn’t. Tanner had kicked his brother’s ass that day, up one side of Flatbush Avenue and down the other.

So it was going to be like that, was it? he thought. Evidently it wasn’t just blue bloods who felt entitled to be snobs.

This time Tanner was the one to lean across the bar, crooking his finger at his brother in the internationally known sign language for “Get your ass over here, you little prick.”