Extreme Danger. Shannon McKenna
named Marla,” he said. “And guess what? I’m not nice.”
“Oh.” She blinked like a trapped bunny.
He squelched a foolish impulse to trust her. “Wait here.”
Like she had any choice. He loped back into the security room to check out the infrared. Did a slow, steady sweep with the thermal imager, three hundred and sixty degrees. Nothing suspicious. He did it again. Nobody out there with warm blood and a beating heart except for wild animals.
He flicked another switch that showed two different camera angles on the spiral staircase and studied the girl from both sides. Her wet hair hung down, hiding her face. She was trembling. He had to get her warmed up.
No, he told himself sternly. He didn’t. Chivalry could get him killed. He had to think like Zhoglo. No heart, no conscience, no compassion. Cold as a cadaver in a meat locker.
He studied her body. She didn’t have the taut, nervy musculature of someone trained in hand-to-hand. She looked soft, touchable. Built for pleasure, not a sinewy, streamlined killing machine. He was tempted to rule out the possiblity of her being an assassin. But he really did have to search her first.
He hesitated as he went by the linen closet, then yanked out a towel, cursing himself for the soft-headed idiot that he was. He decided to add to his stupidity by grabbing the space heater he saw under a shelf. What the fuck did it matter if the assassin and/or call girl was a little more comfortable while he interrogated her? Zhoglo wasn’t watching. At least he hoped not.
The girl eyed him warily and Nick realized how strange he must look to her, carrying a goddamn space heater and towel like a cabana boy. Fuck it. He plugged it in, aimed a blast of hot air at her. She stiffened as he gathered a handful of her hair and twisted it gently to squeeze the water out, then let it fall.
Thoughts of that garrotte flashed through his mind. He ran his fingers through her wet, silky hair, trying to intuit the tricks a naked female assassin might use to conceal the tools of her trade.
Her hair was amazingly thick and soft. No garrotte wire in it.
She shivered at his touch. No earrings, rings, necklaces, anklets, bracelets, toe rings. She made a wordless protest as he ran his hands over the deep curve of her waist, up her back. Nothing taped up there. Then he moved between those soft thighs, another popular place of concealment. That provoked a squawk of outrage and a furious wriggle. He ignored both.
Nick brushed the edge of his hands up under her tits, which were more than full enough to conceal something taped or tucked up there. Nothing. They were amazingly soft, though. Wow.
He checked them again, just to be thorough. Hmm. That left bodily orifices, but that could wait. Hell, he barely knew the chick.
She flinched at his snort of laughter. “What’s so funny?” she snapped. “Are you done groping me yet, you disgusting pig?”
“Not yet,” he said mildly. He grabbed the towel and started briskly drying her body.
She tried to twist away, sputtering. “Do you mind?”
“Not at all,” he replied. He flung the towel away, ran his eyes over her. She was mostly dry and her lips had more color. Down to business.
“Let’s talk, Becca Cattrell,” he said. “Tell me all about Marla.”
“I-I-I work with her. At the club.” She got points for consistency.
“OK,” he said. “The club. That’s a good place to start. Tell me all about this club, beautiful. Who runs it?”
“Ah, well, the CEO, I guess. James Blaystock the Fourth. It’s the Cardinal Creek Country Club in Bothell. I’m the events coordinator. I arrange meetings, banquets, parties. Weddings.”
Nick’s mental processes flash-froze. He just stared at her. Country club? What in the flying fuck…?
“Marla is my boss,” she babbled. “Marla Matlock. She was the one who gave me the keys to Jerome Sloane’s—he’s her boyfriend—vacation home. It’s the big A-frame on the hill. She told me she’d been coming here to swim for years. She said the owner was a harmless sort of guy—” She faltered. “I take it he’s…not you, right?”
Nick cleared his throat as the possible scenarios morphed into new, even less welcome shapes. “No. He’s definitely not me. This house changed owners recently. A few weeks ago.”
She nodded. “I see. P-p-please,” she whispered. “Let me go.”
Nick crossed his arms over his chest. She could still be lying but Sloane was the name of the guy who owned the nearest house. Nick had a file on him. Jerome Sloane was a rich art dealer in his fifties, who divided his time between Seattle and San Francisco. He had files for the owners of all the other properties on the small island as well. Sloane had left Frakes Island the second week of August and he hadn’t been back.
Plausible cover story, the voice in his head whispered. Anyone else could have done the same research that he had done.
“OK,” he said. “Let’s assume, for a second, that this is true—”
“It is true! I swear, I never meant to—”
“Shut up.” He gave her a thin smile. “Assuming that it’s true, explain to me what you’re doing here in April. And more specifically, explain what the fuck you were doing trespassing stark naked, waking me out of a sound sleep and scaring the living shit out of me at—” He checked his watch. “12:40 A.M.”
Her eyelashes fluttered. “I?” she asked delicately. “Scared you?”
“Explain,” he growled. “And you’d better make it convincing.”
She let out a shuddering breath. “I, um, had some p-p-personal problems lately. I wanted to, you know, to get away from it all. Marla persuaded Jerome to give me the keys to his island house. She told me about your beautiful pool. I just didn’t think. She said nobody would mind. I guess she was, um, wrong.”
He processed that. In point of fact, he had not yet had time to rig up the security system for the poolhouse, just the video. His beeper had gone off when she tripped the infrared set up at the perimeter.
This sucked. His chances of living through Zhoglo’s impending visit were slim enough without involving clueless innocent bimbos who organized weddings and banquets. “Do you trespass naked often?” he asked, genuinely curious.
Dark, curling lashes swept down over enormous leaf-green eyes. She had a dusting of freckles on her nose. Concentrate, damn it.
“No,” she whispered. “I’ve never done anything like this in my life. It was, um, an exercise. I’m trying to be—I want to be more, ah, adventurous.”
Adventurous? He stared at her. His lips twitched. His cock lengthened. Hell, he’d show her adventure. A hot, sweaty adventure that she’d never forget. Left, right, sideways, upside down, inside out.
No, he wouldn’t. “Adventurous?” he repeated.
She shrugged as best she could. “I know it sounds stupid. But I’ve always been a good girl.” The rest of her explanation came faster. “I brushed my teeth, I did my homework, I took my vitamins, I worked hard, I put myself last…I guess that’s why my fiancé thought I’d make such a good politician’s wife—”
“Fiancé?” He came down on the word, like shark jaws chomping.
“Ex-fiancé.” She added the prefix with vicious emphasis. “I’ve never had the nerve to misbehave, so the bastard figured there would be no dirt for the gossipmongers to dig up. He might as well marry a department-store mannequin, that condescending, manipulative son of a bitch—”
“Can we stick to the subject, please?”
Too late. The chick was on a roll. A detail came back to him—the nearly empty wine bottle he’d glimpsed by the pool.