Authors: Penny McCall
Harmony sipped on a Diet Coke and snacked on fries dipped in chili. Cole reached over and draped a napkin across her front, tucking it into the neck of her T-shirt. His fingers brushed across the upper swells of her breasts, her heart shot up into her throat, and she almost put the car into the ditch.
Cole, when she met his eyes, had a grin on his face. “The shoulder’s far enough,” he said.
She scowled at him, but she didn’t say anything, not when she couldn’t keep what she felt out of her voice. No point letting him know that pulling over to the shoulder was the least of what she wanted to do.
She got the car back under control and steered it up the Highway 24 westbound ramp. Cole kept his hands to himself, and as long as she didn’t look his way, everything was fine. It helped when he fell asleep, not waking up until they hit the outskirts of Fort Wayne, Indiana.
He took the wheel then, steering them around Fort Wayne on I-469, and almost directly south on I-69 toward Indianapolis. Harmony would have stopped there, but Cole insisted on pushing it another two hundred and fifty miles or so to St. Louis. Harmony didn’t object; it was two hundred and fifty miles closer to Richard, and St. Louis was a large city with a lot of suburban sprawl around it. They could get lost there long enough to rest and recharge, and make a real start at putting this thing to bed.
“You don’t have any ex-con friends here, do you?” Harmony asked when they hit the outskirts of the city.
“Not the kind you’d want to run into,” Cole said. “They’re not what you’d call ‘rehabilitated.’ ”
“Neither are you.”
“True, but I’m harmless.”
Not in the ways that really counted, she thought. When she’d cooked up this crazy scheme, she’d factored in things like how difficult it would be to control a man who’d been in prison for eight years, a man who had to hate the FBI for putting him there. When she’d first laid eyes on the nerd-turned-muscleman, she’d almost put the kibosh on the whole thing. Only the fact that she’d gone too far to turn back had kept her moving forward.
Now she was wondering how she would’ve ever gotten this far without Cole. It was more than his cooperation, more than the comfort of having someone at her side, and it was more than the fact that she desired him.
More
, however, was a term she couldn’t begin to define at the moment. And it was a term that might never need definition.
Harmony was almost a hundred percent positive Cole was working some angle of his own, some way to keep himself out of prison in case she couldn’t. It stung that he didn’t trust her, but she could live with that as long as he did what she needed him to do.
“This place looks like it’ll do,” Cole said. “What do you think?”
Harmony read the sign in front of the little travel motel Cole had pulled into. “Hurry Inn?”
“They have weekly rates.”
“We’re not staying for a week,” she said, but absently because she was busy looking the place over and deciding Cole was right.
The Hurry Inn looked like one of the once-charming little travel motels that had popped up along the route west in the fifties, when Mom, Dad, and the kiddies took vacations in faux-wood-sided station wagons. It ran at a forty-five degree angle from the road, with a little business office in front. All the rooms had outside entrances, and there was just enough parking for the residents.
The building was showing its age, some of the brick needed repointing, and the wood trim could’ve used a coat of paint. But the parking lot was clean and it didn’t seem to be a by-the-hour place. It wasn’t filled with families, either, but with weekly rates it probably appealed to single men on the low end of the pay scale.
Harmony handed Cole a hundred-dollar bill. “Go in and get us a room. In the back would be best.”
He looked at the money then at her.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” He got out of the car, went into the little office at the front, and came back a couple minutes later. He drove to the far end of the motel, parking in front of the last room on the end.
Harmony took a deep breath and levered herself out of the car, following Cole into the room. It didn’t surprise her to see a double bed instead of two singles. That’s the way her day had gone. “The accommodations are going to be a problem.”
“Anything else would have been suspicious,” he said, “and requesting two beds would have defeated the purpose. You sent me into the office alone for a reason.”
“So I did.” She pulled her wallet out of the duffel and went back outside. “I’m going to find some food that doesn’t come in a paper wrapper,” she said. “I’ll be back in a little while.”
But she didn’t get into the car.
Cole went to the door and looked out at her. “Don’t worry. I’ll be here when you get back.”
“If I didn’t know that, I wouldn’t have given you money, and I wouldn’t be leaving you alone here.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“Nothing,” she said. They both knew it wasn’t the truth, but there was no way she was telling Cole that she wanted him to trust her in return.
Things got worse from there. Measurably worse. Cole dug into the steak, baked potato, and asparagus she brought back like a man who’d been starved. For sex. He moaned, he groaned, he closed his eyes and let his head fall back. Harmony checked below the table while she had the opportunity. No obvious bulges. Okay, so he wasn’t that excited about the meal, but he made a good show of it.
Harmony did a lot of restless shifting in her chair and concentrated almost desperately on her chicken, rice, and broccoli. It tasted like cardboard.
“What’s for dessert?”
His deep voice struck a sympathetic chord on her already overworked nerves, all but jolting her out of her chair. She slid a smaller take-out box over to him, already regretting its contents even before he opened it and said, “Lemon meringue pie. I’m touched.”
“I owed you,” she said, getting to her feet before he could open the take-out container. “Don’t read anything into it.” She snagged her duffel and headed for the bathroom, pulling out the last clean item of clothing she had with her, a pair of running shorts. She slipped them on, and bolted out of the bathroom, straight through the room, and out the door to the parking lot.
The idea was to exercise herself into a stupor. She didn’t have much hope either cardio or yoga would work. As tense as she was it would take the Dalai Lama himself to meditate her into a state where she had any hope of sleep. Since she doubted he’d come down from his mountain to help her work off a case of hormonal overload, a couple hours of exhausting exercise might do the trick. Or it might not. Maybe the only thing that could help her work off this much tension was the man who’d caused it.
Cole Hackett, however, was the one remedy she didn’t dare try.
She stared bleary-eyed around the room, dimly lit by the fluorescent parking-lot lights leaking through the thin drapes, and tried to shove the nightmare out of her mind. Except it wasn’t a nightmare. Richard was being held captive somewhere, hurting and afraid for his life. She couldn’t do anything about it, at least not by herself, and there was a price to Cole’s assistance that she hadn’t expected.
Take tonight, for instance. After her run she’d taken a shower and popped into bed, without sparing Cole a word or a look. Back off, she was saying, keep your distance. She couldn’t have sent a clearer message if she’d written it on his boxers with a Sharpie.
But did he back off? Did he take the chair or the floor and leave her in peace? No. He’d climbed into bed with her some time after she drifted off to sleep, and now there he was, the jerk, right beside her, looking all warm and sexy. And here she was, wide awake and afraid to breathe for fear the sight and the smell of him would lure her into doing something she’d regret later. And she wasn’t just talking about sex.
Though she was only inches away from Cole, she felt alone, lonely, and uncertain and anxious. It would be so easy to roll over and steal a little comfort. It would have been a lot more tempting if she hadn’t known he’d take it as an invitation—and as much as she’d like to offer one, she couldn’t. She needed to keep her distance, and not just for her own self-respect. Mike Kovaleski, heck, everyone at the Bureau thought she had trouble separating her emotions from her work. But she could. It just took a little self-control . . .
Cole rolled over and draped his arm over her waist, sliding his hand around her butt and snugging her against him.
Okay,
she amended,
a lot of self-control. And willpower.
She tried to shove him off, but he only slung one of his legs over hers and wrapped himself around her so she was well and truly trapped, her face against his neck, drawing him in with every breath she took so she couldn’t even escape into herself and find peace. She made a last-ditch effort to push him off, but he was deadweight, sleeping the sleep of a man with a full stomach and a clear conscience. Well, maybe just a full stomach. He didn’t deserve a clear conscience.
For the first time in days she felt good. Comfortable, safe, protected. The tension drained out of her muscles, and her mind went fuzzy, sliding down into exhaustion. She fought it. There was no way she intended to wake up wrapped in Cole’s arms.
She attempted to muster up some outrage over his criminal past, but the most she could manage was mild irritation. He had an abrasive personality, she reminded herself. He was high-handed and sarcastic, and borderline chauvinistic. None of that worked either. Even the normal sexual buzz wasn’t enough, and the next thing she knew it was morning, and she was surfacing from the best sleep she’d had since Richard had been snatched.
She resisted full consciousness because she was having the best dream of her life. She stretched, sighed, her breasts aching and the kind of tightness deep inside that made her move restlessly, needing . . .
“Keep that up and we won’t be getting out of bed for a while.”
Harmony went still. She kept her eyes shut, reaching out with one hand and encountering firm, resilient flesh. Cole’s flesh. Worse, she was draped half over him, one of her legs nestled between his, his thigh riding high against her center. And that wasn’t all. His mouth was on her neck, his hands were on her bottom, and there was something hard poking her in the side. And she liked it. All of it. She wanted more. In fact, she wanted that mouth to keep moving over her skin, and she wanted that hardness deep inside her, and clearly she was getting that message across loud and clear because he skimmed his hand up, along her ribs, heading for territory she couldn’t allow him to explore, at least not while she was awake. If he touched her breast, she was going to climb the rest of the way on top of him—after she took off what little she was wearing.
She scrambled off him and kept going until she was completely out of bed. Cole had turned the air-conditioning unit up to arctic last night, so it was cold, especially on all the places her body was damp. That wasn’t why her nipples were still peaked, though. It was the way he was looking at her. And the fact that she still wanted him to do more than look.
She crossed her arms over her breasts, expecting him to make some smart comment. But he wasn’t laughing, and the look in his eyes . . .
“I thought you’d take the chair,” she said, feeling a need to defend herself.
“If I knew you were going to climb on top of me then back off, I would have.”
“I was sleeping.”
“So was I.”
“Not when I woke up. If you were a . . .”
“What? A gentleman? If I was a gentleman, I’d have taken the chair.” And Cole got out of bed, still hard and even more magnificent.
He knew she was looking, too, and she must have done a pretty poor job of hiding her feelings.
“Your choice,” he said.
“It would be a mistake.”
“Women,” he muttered, as he walked by her. “Always screwing up sex with emotion.”
He dug through Juan’s parting gifts and came up with a clean pair of jeans and a T-shirt, disappearing with them into the bathroom and leaving Harmony stung. But only because he’d hit a sore spot. It had nothing to do with the fact that he could have sex with her and feel nothing beyond physical gratification. Wanting him to feel something meant she was feeling something.
That would be the biggest mistake of all.
“If you want Clooney, just close your eyes and pretend.”
“Even I don’t have that much imagination.”
“Your loss,” he said, taking the chair across the table from her. “What’re you doing?”
“I thought I’d take a stab—”
The next thing Cole knew he was across the room and bending over her shoulder. He didn’t hear the rest of what she said, his eyes scanning the screen, his hands flying on the keyboard as he shut it down.
“Tell me you didn’t use a recognizable ID.”
“No,” she said. “And I, uh, b-bounced the signal through Eastern Europe.”
Cole backed off, the breathiness of her voice, the quaver in it spearing straight through his panic. He went from terror to desire so fast it left him light-headed, and then he went back to terror—a different kind of terror that had to do with who and what she was, how drastically he wanted her, and what it would cost him to have her. By the time he found his emotional feet again, he could see that Harmony was every bit as rattled as he was.
So he pretended like the last five minutes had never taken place, knowing she would do the same. “No harm done,” he said. “You weren’t even close to the FBI firewall.”
Harmony let out a soft sigh.
“So what’s the plan?”
“I think we’ve put enough distance between us and our pursuers to stay here a day or two. Get some rest, and see what kind of progress you can make on moving the money.”
Two days with her in that tiny room with one bed? There’d be no rest for him, Cole knew. Hell, she’d probably shoot him before they checked out. It was the only form of rejection she hadn’t tried yet, and if she gave him even half the encouragement she had last night, it would take a gunshot wound to stop him. “I thought you were in a hurry to get to LA.”
“I am, but I have to call the kidnappers again tonight.”
Or maybe just her, sounding forlorn and looking a little scared and sick to her stomach. The urge to get her into bed wasn’t gone completely. It never really was, but it was a hell of a lot easier to ignore when she looked like that.
“They’ll be expecting progress,” she continued more briskly, putting on her FBI agent face. “If they don’t hear it . . .”
“I haven’t broken into the bank accounts yet.” He hadn’t broken the system yet, for that matter.
“You’re not sure you can get in without being tracked,” she said.
Cole shrugged, conceding the point. “I have to make sure I’m not being tracked, and there’s no way I can get in safely and accomplish what you want in the next few hours.”
She mulled over that for a minute. “Can you open an offshore account and give them access to view the balance without making withdrawals?”
“Child’s play.” At least it was after a decade in jail, but he decided it was better not to let her know just how many laws he’d actually broken while he was being rehabilitated from his honest former life.
“Good,” she said, “let’s start there.”
Cole shut down her browser and pulled up another, using one of several fake IDs he’d set up while incarcerated. Even if Treacher knew he’d been hacking in prison and put geeks on it around the clock, there was no way for them to tie Joe Smith to Cole Hackett. There were literally millions of Joe Smiths in the western hemisphere. That was why he’d chosen it. As long as he stayed away from the FBI’s system, they should be perfectly safe.
“So,” he said while he worked, “are you really going to steal the money?”
“Yes and no.” Harmony got to her feet, came around the table, and leaned over his shoulder. “I’m not going to hand over the money unless there’s no other option, but we have to transfer enough to make the kidnappers think we’re doing what they want us to do, and that means millions.”
Cole glanced over his shoulder at her, which only made matters worse since her breasts were right in his face. “Why don’t you just climb into my lap?”
“I’m sorry, is this bothering you?”
Cole lifted his eyes to hers.
“I just wanted to see what you were doing.”
He still didn’t respond verbally. He let his expression speak for him.
She stopped smiling and eased off a couple of steps.
It wasn’t nearly far enough, but he faced forward again and took some deep, calming breaths.
“Chanting mantras?” she asked sweetly. From a safe distance.
“That’s the second time today you were all over me. Do it again and there won’t be enough mantras in the world.”
“I wasn’t ‘all over you.’ I didn’t even touch you. I only wanted to watch. Call it a learning opportunity.”
He could have given her a learning opportunity. But she had a point that couldn’t be ignored. “In case I get killed?”
“Or run off.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.
“I noticed.” Harmony gave him a wide berth, circling the table to take the chair across from him again.
If he kept his eyes on the screen and slouched a little, he couldn’t see more of her than the top of her head. And if he concentrated hard enough, it kept the mental pictures at bay. Now, if he could just get her to shut up.
“I never really had to hold you at gunpoint, Cole, but I always had the feeling you were holding back, waiting to see if I could pull any of this off. After Juan’s that changed. Why?”
He shrugged. “I decided to make the commitment to your cause.” An obvious lie, and even after saying it he agonized over telling her what was really going on. But he still couldn’t quite trust her, and short of torture she wasn’t going to drag Victor Treacher’s name out of him. “It’s getting you what you want, so just go with it. I really need to work, and I can’t with you breathing down my neck.”
She got to her feet and wandered over to the window, then to the bed. She was wearing the halter dress again, the one she’d had on that first day at Lewisburg. The one that left nothing to the imagination, especially as the jacket was nowhere in sight.
“Or pacing around the room,” he said, adding, “or watching television,” when she retrieved the TV remote and sat on the end of the bed.
“I guess I could wash some things out.”
Right, like the idea of her rinsing out her panties was any less distracting than her lounging on the rumpled bedclothes with her long legs bare and just a couple of thin halter straps between him and paradise.
“I could use something to eat.”
There was a split second of silence while Cole tried to convince himself they weren’t both replaying that sentence and considering the possibilities.
Then Harmony shot off the bed, and raced across the room. “You want food,” she said, slipping on her shoes and taking a tiny little purse out of the duffel. “I’ll get you food. What do you want? No, never mind, I’ll surprise you.” She all but ran out the door.
It took Cole a few minutes, and he had to open a window, get the scent of her out of the room, but after a little while he managed to lift his hands to the keyboard. The familiarity of it helped put Harmony out of his mind, enough that he was able to set up the bank account she’d asked for. And another for himself.