“Talk about room service! I could get used to this.”
Damon set her down on the cold tiles with a sudden clap on her butt. “Get moving.”
“Hey!” Glaring at him for that bit of cockiness, Rory rubbed the affronted cheek. “That was uncalled for.” In light of their time constraints, she left it at that, proceeding to wash herself. An argument would be pointless, and she took pride in being professional. Since she was the one running late, she decided to overlook the indignity.
Her professionalism, however, had its limits.
She snuck a glance at her Adonis brushing his teeth while she soaped her folds. There was something indescribably intimate about sharing a bathroom with a lover and watching his toilet. Especially when he was fully dressed and she . . . wasn’t.
The potential for so much more was almost irresistible, considering Damon’s unorthodox and high-handed method of warming her last night.
“What are you up to now?”
Whipping her head around at the question, Rory blinked guiltily at the suspicious expression on her Adonis’s face, which made him look definitely like a Fed despite the stubble on his cheeks. “Huh?”
“You’re woolgathering.” His gaze dropped to her fingers, which had stopped combing through her pubes to circle her clit.
“I am not.” Forcing heat into her denial, she quickly rinsed and dried off, silently cursing her wayward body.
“Yes, you were. I could tell.” By his adamant tone and the knowing quirk of his lips, Damon had to mean he’d somehow sensed the carnal trend of her thoughts. Was it an aspect of his incubus skills?
“Were you reading my mind?” Rory demanded as she pulled on a loose beige sweater over her shirt and navy pants, bland clothes to help her blend into the background.
"Not hardly.”
She snorted doubtfully. “That’s not polite, you know.” As she passed him, she poked him playfully to emphasize her point. His hand whipped out to intercept hers, but she managed to graze his side.
At the contact, Damon flinched, a quickly suppressed shiver suggesting that his reaction wasn’t due to the near miss.
Rory grinned in delighted discovery. "You’re ticklish!”
“I am not.” He echoed her denial—a shade defensively, to her critical ear, especially since he twisted away to avoid her trapped hand. It seemed the supercompetent Fed had his share of weaknesses. She tucked that detail in the back of her mind for later, intrigued by the crack in her Adonis’s armor.
“If you’re done here, time’s a-wasting.”
“I’m done.” Picking up her bag, she followed Damon out of the hotel room, content that the balance of power between them was equal once more.
He led her to an old gray Zastava Yugo, nothing flashy that would draw attention. The boxy two-door sedan was so common, no one would give it a second glance. The interior wasn’t anything to write home about, but since it wasn’t a luxury car, that was only what Rory’d expected. Unfortunately, very few jobs required her to arrive in a limousine, even though she could afford it.
Damon kept a sharp eye out on the way out of Skopje.
Respecting his need to concentrate, she watched the streets as well, wondering if her gut would warn her of a tail. No one followed them as far as she could tell. That early in the day, all they met on the road were trucks and a handful of cars, just strangers passing in the lamp-lit twilight.
Eventually, they left the sprawling city behind, following the winding road up and around the Vardar River valley. The pastel dawn was a distant memory by the time they reached the foothills of the Šar Planina, the snowcapped mountain range dividing Macedonia and Kosovo.
Rory’s first really good view of the peaks made her blink. Her previous trip to Kosovo had been to the western part of the province. She’d flown in, then taken the train. While she’d seen mountains on that trip, they hadn’t loomed large in the horizon as did the ones Damon and she were approaching. The thought of getting up close and personal with those rugged slopes, some of which rose more than eight thousand feet high, didn’t exactly appeal to her. She shifted in her seat to keep her butt from going numb, feeling the weight of sedentary hours. Luckily, they were just driving through.
Despite the steep, tree-lined mountainsides, picturesque waterfalls and—once they got higher—stunning vistas, the long drive gave her little to occupy her mind. They were taking a smuggler’s route across the border and the tension of the unknown was starting to get to her. This was the real start to the job and she had a partner—and lover—about whom she knew next to nothing, save that he could kill in cold blood through dreams and make her body erupt in exquisite pleasure with just his hands and mouth.
With most of their plans in place and her hyperactive imagination beginning to weave worst-case scenarios, she turned to Damon for distraction. “How’d you get into your line of work, anyway?” Twisting around to lean back against the door, she toed off her shoe, pulled her left leg to her chest, resting her bare foot on the seat, and studied his profile.
What was it about him that she found so fascinating? Tall, dark, handsome, he certainly fit Hollywood’s bill of a secret agent—though right then with his hair loose and the beginnings of a beard shadowing his jaw, he looked more like a rogue than a Fed—but that wasn’t it.
“Did you answer an ad in the classifieds? Attend a casting call?” That didn’t seem so far-fetched when she considered how easily he changed personas—and all without her advantages. The man had acting skills to spare. The fact that he placed them in the service of the government was almost admirable.
Damon shot her a sharp glance out of the corner of his eye, then returned his attention to the narrow, winding track. He handled the boxy car with steady competence, avoiding flashy, aggressive maneuvers going up the slopes.
Felix always said you could tell a lot about a man from the way he moved. In that case, Damon was competent and confident— decisive. Since she had to work with someone, Rory was glad it was him.
After a long pause, long enough that she thought he’d decided to ignore her questions, he shrugged. “You might say I was born to it.”
The answer didn’t tell Rory much, but since he seemed willing to entertain her curiosity, she wasn’t about to let the topic slide. “You mean you’re the product of some supersecret government experiment?” she asked, tongue firmly in cheek.
He snorted at that, crow’s-feet appearing as his eye narrowed and his lips quirked in amusement. A deep dimple flashed in his cheek almost too quick to be seen. Hollywood had missed a great leading man when her Adonis chose to become a Fed. “Hardly that—more a family tradition.”
Rory blinked at his answer, taken aback by their common ground. She, too, had followed in her father’s footsteps into the family business, although most people wouldn’t consider it in that light.
“What about you?”
“The same,” she blurted out, still stunned by the similarity of their reasons.
His brow shot up just before his head snapped around in her direction. “Family?”
“Why not?” Rory retorted before her brain finally caught up with her mouth.
Shit. What am I saying?
She bit her lip, horrified by her loose tongue.
Damn it, Rory, why don’t you just spill the whole story about lamias and why diScipios live in the shadows?
“No reason, I suppose. I just didn’t—” He broke off and shook his head impatiently. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“Meaning?”
Damon frowned, obviously unused to being questioned, the hardening of his jaw letting the Fed peek out from behind the rogue. “Meaning exactly that: I wasn’t thinking.”
Saying nothing, she braced herself against the door as he muscled the Yugo through a sharp curve. Though the rear wheels slid toward the edge, she kept her eyes on him, leaving her silence to speak for her.
“You’re a cool one.” He sighed. “I just hadn’t thought of burglary as a family tradition, that’s all.” He shot her another of his lightning-quick glances. “Or should I say family
business
?”
It was her turn to shake her head, putting a halt to the conversation. If she wasn’t careful, he’d find out everything by the time the job was over.
Chilled by his perspicacity, Rory righted herself in her seat and stared out her window. The scenery passed in a blur of green before her unseeing eyes as her mind raced in thought. With that one slip of her tongue, Damon had come closer to the truth than anyone else who wasn’t a diScipio, something her family worked hard to avoid.
And yet . . .
She’d have to decide soon whether she could trust him with her secret. Given how quick he was to pull his gun, it would be unfortunate if he shot her out of ignorance, not to mention her getting injured would put paid to the job. Shapeshifting might work to eliminate bruises, but Rory suspected that bullet wounds were a different case altogether, and she rather preferred not to find out the hard way that she was right. Certainly none of her lamia relatives had mentioned healing major injuries by Changing.
Her heart skipped when she remembered how suddenly that matte black gun could appear in Damon’s hand—as though he’d pulled it out of thin air. The threat implicit in its appearance had brought home to her how deadly the commission could be.
At least she’d thought it had . . . until he’d taken out that man on the plane. That was when she’d realized that he could kill her anytime he wanted, just by entering her dreams. Problem was, the danger only made him more attractive.
Aurora diScipio, that’s nuts.
She had to focus on the job: get the nuke and get out. While Damon Venizélos was fine for a romp, she had to remember he was a Fed. Once he had his bomb, they’d never see each other again.
Tall, snowcapped mountains ringed the low town just across the Šar Planina from Macedonia. They vanished into blue mists in the distance and into fluffy white clouds in the heights. In the valley between, a river bisected what Rory could see of the town, a patchwork of old buildings sprawling on either side of raised stone riverbanks. On the other side of the valley, another river rushed down the slopes of another mountain to mix and mingle its waters with the one she could see, but it was too far away to make out any details. Closer by, red poppies dotted the grassy fields beside the road, startling contrast to all that verdancy.
It would have been charming if she didn’t know what lurked behind the picturesque scene. Somewhere in that town, an arms dealer waited to sell a nuke to terrorists.
She turned to her new partner, who’d pulled over by a stand of trees with a commanding view of the town. What was he thinking now that they’d arrived? His clean-cut profile with the black sunglasses hiding his expressive eyes told her little. For her part, she was eager to move on. The job was at hand and she had a commission to fulfill. This stop was an unwelcome delay.
Crouched further down the slope, Damon kept his thoughts to himself. He stayed there for a minute or so, motionless, his dark head bent, wavy locks falling forward to veil his expression.
Perplexed by his inaction, Rory frowned. Was he praying? “What are you doing?”
“Acclimatizing myself to the feel of the town.”
After visually gauging their distance to the sprawl of low buildings filling the valley, she blinked. “You can pick up something from all the way here?” Did that mean he could track her across a similar distance?
Damon shook his head, brushing his pants as he stood up. “Nothing specific—just the general flavor of the place, but even that helps.”
Rory crossed her arms in front of her, not enjoying the confusion his opaque comments engendered. “Helps what?”
“Me.” He cast her a sidelong look before he continued. “It’s disorienting, entering a new place cold. The atmosphere, the emotions, can be overwhelming.”
“So you’re, what, inoculating yourself?”
“You might say that.” Despite the dark lenses of his sunglasses, he managed a boyishly rueful smile that did uncanny things to her insides. “But it also lets me concentrate on detecting possible undesirable contact.” He pointed to a nearby ridge.
Squinting in the direction he indicated, she made out what looked like a manned checkpoint. After that, she didn’t question him the next time he chose to stop.
Entering the town didn’t change Rory’s impression of age. Sure, there were taller concrete high-rises to the west, but the closer view of stonework and whitewashed facades, of mosques and the slender towers beside them, only reinforced the sense of history—turbulent history at that. Fresh ruins crowning a nearby hill hinted at ongoing tensions roiling under the picturesque surface.
She got out of the car before they reached the hostel, leaving Damon to make the approach alone while she cased the joint. Though she wouldn’t have any difficulty disguising herself, she preferred to keep a low profile, and the fewer the people who connected him with a particular woman, the better.
Located in an old section of the town, their proposed base of operations was surrounded by low buildings, none of which looked younger than a century. Rory eyed the moderate slopes of the tiled roofs with approval, noting how they abutted that of the hostel on two sides. That would make access easier.
While her partner was arranging for an outward-facing room, she took the opportunity to study the building that would be their base for the next several days. She hadn’t paid much attention to the info on the hostel during their planning sessions, more concerned with the details that directly affected the job. Seeing it now, in three dimensions, she realized it was more of a compound. Rising three stories, it formed a defensible square around a paved courtyard. In a previous life, it might have been a caravansary or the local version of a posting house, since what must have been a stable formed the ground floor of one wing. Today the horses were gone, and boxy cars like their Yugo filled the repurposed stalls.