Betrayed by Trust (2 page)

A
re you serious?”

I shot a glance at Barry, who was looking straight ahead, avoiding my gaze. Muscles bunched at his temple, but my lover didn’t protest.
He
knew
. He knew all along what Foxworth wanted.

“That’s
why you dated me? So you’d know if I was
progressive
?”
Fury burned in the pit of my stomach and I clenched my hand against the urge to smack Barry.

He turned to face me, but still didn’t quite meet my eyes. “It may have started that way, but you’re not just an assignment. We had fun together, didn’t we?”

The realization that Barry had used me stung, but even worse was knowing that I’d been completely taken in by his act. How could I ever trust my judgment again?

I turned back to Foxworth. “Being willing to make love with someone I thought cared for me is not the same as being promiscuous. Or getting knocked up. Why would I even consider seducing a stranger and getting pregnant by him?”

“Because the Golden Path hijacked Arthur’s lineage. Aldwyn is now bound to protect the firstborn of the Altesse line. If you bear Lucius’s first grandchild, when he and Conrad pass on, the Gaian will be bound to your child. Aldwyn will be free of their coercion and his Power will be withdrawn from the Golden Path. More of their energies will be consumed by challenges from their rivals and they’ll have no more influence over the course of public events than any other mega-corporation—which is more than enough.”

I sucked in a deep breath, not quite believing what Foxworth was laying out. “Wait. You want me to bear King Arthur’s great-zillion grandchild? No way.”

“Yes, Ms. Benton. That is exactly what I want you to do.”

“And you want me to seduce a college kid to do it?”

“He’s twenty, and hardly an inexperienced youth.”

“He could live another seventy years! Our hypothetical kid might die before he does. Then what?”

“As long as your child also has a child, Aldwyn will follow that line. The Golden Path will have lost the primary source of their supernatural Power and influence.”

My head was spinning, but I was still impressed, in an uncomfortable sort of way. “That’s a very long-term plan.”

“The Trust is accustomed to taking the long view. We’ve been around for a very long time, Marianne, under many names. As have our enemies. We’ve endured and fought occult threats to humanity for hundreds of years. But this is the age of science. Few know of or believe in the forces of evil that are arrayed against us. Humanity lives in blissful ignorance because we stand watch. And so we prefer it. We’ve all made sacrifices, but we’ll continue to fight as long as we’re needed.”

Foxworth’s voice was strong with conviction. I supposed one couldn’t become the leader of an organization like the Trust without knowing how to persuade people. I knew he was trying to manipulate me, but I still found myself stirred by what he said.

He paused, then continued. “I don’t ask this lightly, my dear. We’re asking you to devote many years of your life to this project, but we’ll do all in our power to ease your path. Liberated though you may be, society still frowns on women bearing children out of wedlock. Barry will give you and the child his name to protect your reputation.”

Marriage? To Barry?
I’d never been one to fantasize about my wedding and what my dress would be like. I was a feminist. I belonged to the National Organization for Women and subscribed to Ms. magazine. I still had hopes that Phyllis Schlafly would fall off her high heels and the Equal Rights Amendment would be ratified. I was responsible for my own orgasms. But I’d always imagined I would love the man I married, and that he’d love me.

Foxworth was still talking. “Whatever intimacies you choose to continue will be up to the two of you, but the Trust will see that you’re sheltered and have a job if you wish to continue to work. Everything will be done to assure your comfort and safety.”

I examined Barry. He had charm and wit, and was pretty good in bed. I’d liked him, but I’d never imagined myself married to him. I didn’t see him as the marrying kind. Now I knew him to be as much a manipulator as Foxworth, only with less class. I wondered if he’d ever really liked me, or if everything between us had been part of qualifying me for this “project,” but I certainly wasn’t going to discuss that in front of Foxworth.

Barry finally turned in his chair to face me and flashed his trademarked crooked grin. I thought it looked a little forced. “We’re pretty good together, don’t you think? We can make a go of it, and your folks will never question that the child isn’t mine.”

I winced. My folks. They’d both been so proud when I’d graduated from Northwestern University and gotten a job with what they thought was the Foxworth Educational Foundation, even if it was only a data entry position. Lately they’d stopped asking about my job, and I had nothing new to tell them, anyway. Mom had started asking about my marital prospects at Christmas last year. She and Dad would be thrilled to have a grandkid, but they were old fashioned. It would break their hearts if I weren’t married first. I wasn’t willing to do that to them.

At least Barry didn’t say he loved me.
I couldn’t have kept myself from slapping him if he’d tried to promulgate that lie.

Can I do this? Have sex with a stranger?
I hadn’t been a virgin when I slept with Barry, but I wasn’t into casual sex, either. Sex meant something to me, even if it didn’t to Barry. Foxworth was asking me to create a life, and change the course of my own. Was this really my fight?

“The Golden Path used Aldwyn’s Power to support the Viet Cong in the Tet Offensive,” Foxworth said softly.

My heart stuttered. He might as well have dumped a bucket of ice water on me. Eleven years ago, in February 1968, my brother had gone missing at Khe Sanh. The Golden Path had helped to take my funny, generous, pain-in-the-ass brother away from his family. Him, and over nine thousand other sons and brothers. I could barely breath for the fury that flashed first hot then cold through my veins. Nine thousand families aching with loss as ours had. Nine thousand wives and girlfriends weeping as Mark’s had. And that wasn’t even counting the wounded. Or those killed in the following seven years. For what? So Altesse and his cronies could sell more weapons?

This
was
my fight.
If I don’t do this, some other woman will have to be recruited
. And while the Trust took the time to find her, what other atrocities would the Golden Path commit? And there was Aldwyn. Did Gaians feel pain? Did stealing his Power hurt him? He’d been enslaved for well over a century. This was important. I could help free him. I could make a difference.

“Okay. What do I do?”

D
an Collier looked up as Barry Mackson approached the open door of his basement office. Four years as a Green Beret serving in-country in southeast Asia had honed his situational awareness to a fine point. Even though that part of his life was five years in the past, he hadn’t lost his instincts. He didn’t really need them in this situation, though. Mackson was expected, along with one of their coworkers, a woman named Marianne Benton.

Isaac Foxworth himself had briefed Dan yesterday about his new assignment. Every afternoon for the next six weeks Dan would be teaching Mackson and Benton about her target, Conrad Altesse. Dan would drill them on their undercover identities as well, so Benton could get close to Conrad without raising any alarms.

“Hey Collier! What’s happening?” Mackson strode into Dan’s office without a knock or waiting to be invited. Dan shook his hand without rising.

The woman he was supposed to brief slipped in quietly behind Mackson, then stepped up beside the field agent.

Dan stood as a bolt of visceral awareness took him off guard. The picture in her file didn’t do Marianne Benton justice, nor had it prepared him for the impact of her petite and curvy body. She was short enough that she could probably walk beneath his outstretched arm without mussing her butter-blond hair. This
is the woman Foxworth wants to send into the wolf’s den?

Dan couldn’t deny she was exactly the type of woman Conrad Altesse usually went for, but she looked too delicate, too…breakable for any decent man to consider putting her into harm’s way.
What the hell is Foxworth thinking?

Then she speared him with a smile and an amused light glowed in her big blue eyes. “Size isn’t everything, you know,” she said. “Ounce for ounce, the star-nosed shrew is the most vicious animal on the planet.”

The unexpected comment jolted a laugh from him.
Does she read minds like Foxworth, too?
“You don’t look like a vicious shrew.”

Marianne laughed, too. “Good to know.”

“Marianne, a shrew? Naw, she’s a sweetheart.” Mackson draped an arm around her shoulders.

A completely unwarranted jolt of jealousy threw Dan off balance. He shoved the emotion aside. She wasn’t his girlfriend, after all, and Mackson was going to marry her.

Marianne stepped forward with her hand outstretched, shrugging off Mackson’s arm as she did. “Hi, I’m Marianne Benton.”

Dan’s hand engulfed her smaller, but firm, grasp. He tried not to dwell on how nice her hand felt in his.

It was going to be an interesting six weeks.

Late February

A
ny questions?” Dan asked me in a brisk tone. He wore his usual office uniform: crisply pressed jeans, a button-down long sleeve shirt with the sleeves rolled back, and a solid blue tie with a Scooby-Doo tie-tack. His leather jacket hung on a hook by the door.

He’d been briefing me for the last few weeks on Conrad Altesse. Barry seldom shared our tutoring sessions as he was already familiar with the information. Dan had drilled me on all the info there was to be had on my quarry, never indicating one way or the other whether he approved or disapproved of my intention to get pregnant by a man I neither knew nor cared about.

In most respects, Conrad Altesse was like the frat-boys I remembered from college: self-absorbed, handsome, party-friendly, and only moderately studious. Unlike most students though, Conrad had his own apartment that he shared with two bodyguards, both of whom were former British Special Forces operatives. That actually was a good thing, as Dan had so eloquently put it, because they were more likely to understand a guy’s need to get laid and give him space—once they ran a security check on his prospective bedmate. To that end, the Trust had created an amended history for me. The details of my new life would remain close to the truth. My alter-ego still had graduated from Northwestern, but my name would be Mary Potter, taken from a young woman who had died shortly after graduation. Instead of the Foundation, I was supposedly employed by Ferrari as a secretary in their Chicago sales division. In the unlikely event that anyone went looking, they wouldn’t find even a tenuous connection between me and Foxworth.

It was clear now that Barry hadn’t chosen to date me himself. The Trust had singled me out because I fit the profile Dan had assembled on the kind of woman Conrad typically went for: petite, blonde, and older. Not that I was old, but at twenty-six, I was several years senior to Conrad. To up my chances of gaining his attention, I’d learned all I could about soccer and rugby, since Conrad had spent most of his childhood in England and France. I was ready.

“One thing I’ve been wondering,” I asked Dan. “We know Conrad doesn’t usually stick with one woman very long. What if I don’t get pregnant right away?”

Dan nodded, his brown eyes gentle and neutral. “One of our practitioners will make sure you’re ovulating when it’s time.” He spoke as dispassionately as a physician.

“Practitioners? You mean a doctor?”

Dan gave me a look that in essence said,
You know better. Remember who you’re dealing with here.
“Some are psychic, others use magic. They’ll adjust the rhythm of your body and enhance your natural pheromones, making it easier for you to, uh … connect. It won’t harm you, and once done it won’t be detectable by any supernatural protection Conrad may have. Your chances of conceiving will increase tremendously.”

It all sounded so clinical. “Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am,” I murmured. Sometimes it didn’t seem real that I was planning to do something that would completely change the direction of my life. To be coldly intimate with a stranger, get pregnant, marry Barry. Barry, who was fun in bed but who was doing this out of duty, just as I was. Once again, my mind cycled through all the arguments both pro and con, and came to the same conclusion. Someone had to free Aldwyn, and wrest his Power away from the Golden Path. It might as well be me. Soldiers like my brother put their lives on the line to serve: all I had to do was get friendly with a cute college guy until he knocked me up, and then raise the kid to be a decent human being. How hard could it be?

Dan frowned, and for the first time in our weeks of training, his eyes were no longer neutral, but concerned. He leaned forward, resting his crossed arms on the table between us. His forearms were thick with muscle, and his shoulders strained against his shirt. “Are you having second thoughts? You do have a choice about this.”

Dan was usually businesslike and reserved. Suddenly I was aware of him not just as my instructor, but as a man. A man with a nice build, slightly shaggy brown hair, and caring eyes. A blush heated my face. I didn’t want him to think less of me for doing this. “You don’t approve?”

He shook his head. “I just want you to be sure.”

I shrugged. “I’m as sure as I can be. Besides, maybe he’ll be a great lover.”

Barry dribbled warm apricot-scented oil over my back, then worked it into my skin with long, strong strokes. At first his fingers dug into the tight muscles of my lower back, then they drifted down to my glutes, squeezing and sliding over my cheeks. It was heaven after perching on a bar stool all morning entering data, then sitting and being tutored all afternoon. Dan wanted to be sure I was as prepared as I could be, and didn’t give many breaks.

“God, I love your ass.”

He kissed the swell of my hips, then worked his way downward, rubbing my legs, working my hamstrings. He massaged all the way down to my toes, then slowly back up again. His caress slid to the inside of my thighs, and my breath caught in my throat, anticipating. I spread my legs a little in invitation, but he continued upward.

Slick warm fingers slid over my cheeks, following the crease in between. I tensed as he pressed against my back door.

“Are you sure you don’t want to give it try, babe? I think you’ll like it.”

He knew I didn’t want to. This wasn’t the first time he’d asked.

“I’m sure.” I was about to suggest we call it a night, but then his touch continued onward to play between my legs.

Barry had talked me into forgiving him. I wasn’t just a job to him, he’d said. He really liked me. I knew he was probably just saying what I wanted to hear, but it was hard to resist his dimpled grin, and if we were going to go through with this marriage-of-convenience and raise a child together, there was no point in holding a grudge. We might as well make the best of our time together, I told myself, so I’d gone back to his bed.

Barry straddled my legs and pressed his erection against my butt. The oil made him glide easily through my crease. He pulled my hips up so I was on my knees, then bent over me, breathing hard against my shoulder. I wanted him to reach around and touch me, but after a few strokes he pulled a couple of pillows over and put them underneath so my hips were lifted, but not too much. “Perfect,” he declared, then rubbed more oil on my rear. He pressed his cock against my butt and resumed stroking between my cheeks. I wished he were stroking into me, but I’d gone off the Pill as soon as I’d made my decision to seduce Conrad, and while I waited for the hormones to clear my system we couldn’t risk me getting pregnant. Condoms could break, and any baby I conceived had to be Conrad’s. So we found other ways to play without actually having intercourse.

Barry’s breath caught in little grunts in time with his thrusts. He came with a gasp, and the hot spurt of his release landed on my back. He mopped it up with a handful of tissues, then flopped down beside me. I shoved the pillows aside and curled up next to him. He put an arm around my shoulders but made no move finish me. I pushed my irritation aside and began to finger myself.

“Oh. Sorry,” Barry said in a drowsy tone, then reached over to massage my breast with fingers still slick with oil. A minute later he levered himself up so he could draw my other nipple into his mouth while continuing to pluck at the other. He sucked and pinched, sending sharp jolts between my legs. I was barely touching myself, drawing out the pleasure, trying not to come too soon. Barry continued sucking, as his hand left my breast and wandered over my belly. I tensed with desire and anticipation as he pushed my hand away. A moment later his oiled fingers slid into me. His thumb flicked quickly over my sensitized flesh and I clenched around him, coming in a sudden, unexpected rush that wasn’t quite satisfying. He didn’t continue petting as he usually would have, instead he stilled, then withdrew his hand.

Clearly, he wasn’t in the moment. “What is it?” I asked.

Abruptly, Barry pulled away from me. “I can’t do this,” he said as he sat up. His fists clenched in the blue paisley sheet that slid down to his hips. His shoulders were rigid with tension.

I struggled free of the remnants of my orgasm. “You can’t do what? Have sex? I think we just did.”

“Don’t be dense! I can’t let you go through with this plan to do Conrad.”

I looked up at his broad back, startled by his vehemence. We were only three days away from initiating a mission that had been in the works for over a month. “It’s too late for us to back out, even if we wanted to.”

Barry looked over his shoulder at me, his stormy blue eyes narrowed with suppressed emotion. “Not we. You. You can’t do this.”

I sat up and shifted so I could face him. “You picked me for this yourself! You and Kincaid and Foxworth. I’m exactly Conrad’s type.”

“I didn’t know you then.” He wouldn’t meet my eyes, and he sounded defensive. “I’ve changed my mind.”

I ducked my head so I could stare into his baby blues. “What are you saying, Barry?”

His mouth twisted and he ran a hand through his sun-bleached hair, making it stand on end. “I care about you, okay? This is wrong! Foxworth should never have asked it of us. Of you.”

Two months ago I would have been delighted to know Barry cared enough to put a stick in the spokes of his career, but I’d gotten to know him better since then. I liked him well enough to make our temporary marriage work, but I knew it would most likely be just that: temporary. Just long enough to make the child legitimate and protect our reputations. Ultimately, I knew Barry was more attuned to his own self-interest than he was to mine. “Why did you wait so long to say anything?”

Barry shrugged and his pecs rippled with lean muscle. “I didn’t believe you’d go through it. I thought you’d back out.”

He didn’t know me very well if he thought that. “What does Mr. Foxworth say?” Unless Foxworth wanted a change, I was going through with this.

“He won’t have anything to say about it if you pull out. He won’t force you. He can’t. He’ll find someone else.”

I shook my head, not really believing Barry wanted me to quit. Maybe this was another test, to see if I was committed. To be sure I wouldn’t freeze, or screw things up by backing out at the last minute. “I never imagined doing something like this, but the more I learn about the Golden Path, the more I want to stop them. I can make a difference.”

Barry’s normally unflappable expression distorted with distress. “You
want
to let that bastard Conrad grope you? Fuck you? Put his bastard in you? Do you really want me to help pimp you out to that frat boy?”

His words stung. Did he really think I was prostituting myself?

“What I
want
is to stop the people who stole my brother from me!”

Barry reached for my hands. “I understand, but I can’t do it, Marianne. I can’t help you sleep with another guy.”

Did he really care? Then I remembered he’d dated me on orders and slept with me that first time just to see if I was liberated enough to consider the project. More likely he just didn’t want to share his toy. Maybe I shouldn’t have continued to sleep with him. Maybe I should have kept it professional. He’d gotten possessive.

“That’s the mission, Barry. That’s the point of all the research and prep we’ve done, all the planning.”

Anger twisted his face and he jerked his hands free from mine. “If you won’t stop this, I will. I’m pulling out. I can’t do this. I can’t pretend to love Altesse’s child. I won’t marry you. Foxworth needs you to be married to help hide the child from anyone looking. He’ll have to start all over again.” Barry threw off the sheet and jerked on his pants.

So that’s what this is all about.
“You don’t think this is wrong. It’s okay if some other woman spreads her legs for Conrad, just not the girl you’re screwing. You don’t want to share, and every time you look at the child you’re going to be reminded that I was with someone else.”

Barry turned abruptly to face me. “Is that so strange?”

Fury prickled over my skin. “It is when you set me up for this in the first place!” I hopped off the bed to square-off with him, heedless of my nudity. “You only slept with me because Kincaid asked you to, not because you liked me, or even because you found me particularly attractive. Maybe that changed over time, or maybe it didn’t, but Foxworth is right. This needs to be done, and short of assassinating Altesse and every member of his extended family, this is the only way to free Aldwyn. Pull out if you want to, but I’m going through with this.”

“You want to be a Mata Hari,” he said, shrugging into his shirt with quick angry movements.

“No, actually I don’t. I’d rather not be betrayed by the people I’m trying to help.”

Barry just shook his head, made a disgusted noise, and left.

Fury rose in my throat, and a second later I snatched Michener’s
Chesapeake
from the bedside table. It flew across the room, slamming into the door. Barry had duped me again, sweet-talking his way back into my bed only to pull the sheet out from under me. Only this time his agenda wasn’t for the Trust, it was purely selfish.