Prescription: Makeover (8 page)

He could picture her even now, how her sharp, hard-edged features had fit in with the lifestyle and how her brittle laugh had cracked at the edges, sometimes turning sad.

“I didn’t like her at first,” he said, more to himself than to Max. “What was to like? She was one of Viggo’s women. But I’d been under too long and I was getting strung out, starting to question things. There had already been two opportunities for Grosskill to move in, but he’d messed them both up. Thankfully not so Viggo knew. But I knew.” He paused. “I was frustrated with the Bureau, mad at Grosskill for screwing things up and, yeah, starting to make friends in the organization. The lines were blurring even before Sharilee, but she brought things to a head.”

“You fell for her?”

William shook his head. “No, but we became friends of a sort. Then one day…” He pressed his hands flat against the glass and watched the raindrops trickle beyond his palms. “A bunch of us were there — me, Trehern, the doctor he’d cultivated as a source for pain meds, Sharilee, maybe six other guys…” He trailed off, remembering that it’d been raining that day, too. “Trehern was waiting on a big deal and he was getting antsy. He’d had a run of bad luck and needed a big score, kept thinking this was it, this was the one that would turn the organization around. Guess he’d gotten suspicious, too. There’d been one too many leaks. He knew the feds had someone on the inside.”

“He made you?” Max asked.

William shook his head. “Not me. He had it down to Sharilee or the doctor. Played one off against the other for a few minutes, getting madder and madder when they both kept denying it. I tried to calm things down, tried to keep Trehern on an even keel. I was arrogant enough to think I had everything under control, but…” He trailed off, remembering how it’d escalated too quickly. “The bastard shot her dead where she stood. She got this surprised look on her face and sort of said ‘oh’ before she went down. Just ‘oh.’”

Max let the silence rest for a minute, then said, “I’m sorry.”

“Be sorry for her, not me.” William closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against the cool windowpane. “I was six, maybe seven feet away from her. I could’ve stopped it. I
should’ve
stopped it.”

“You were on the job.”

“So was she. Turns out she was DEA and the doctor was with HFH. It’d been Grosskill’s bright idea — a multi-agency op where the left hand didn’t know what the right one was doing.”

“Then her death is on Grosskill, not you,” Max said.

“It’s on both of us,” William said quietly. “I let it go on too long, thinking I could stop Trehern without breaking cover.” He exhaled on a curse. “Not five minutes after the shooting, the DEA came in with guns blazing. Trehern slipped out ahead of the bust, and a couple of us got snagged, but Grosskill decided to keep me under. He let one of Trehern’s lawyers get me out, figuring it’d confirm my loyalty if it looked like I’d been put through the wringer and kept my mouth shut.” He grimaced. “That was one of the few times the bastard did the right thing, though I didn’t thank him for it at the time.” He turned away from the window and met his partner’s eyes. “I was in nearly another year after that before we finally closed the net.”

Even then, Grosskill had managed to screw it up, costing two good agents their lives. By the end of it all, William hadn’t given a damn about the presidential commendation. He’d spent a month lying on a beach on the FBI’s tab until the nightmares died down and then handed in his resignation. He’d wandered for a bit and ended up back in Boston, where it had all begun. He’d met Max there and he’d found a new purpose, but the work had brought him right back to the same place — watching out for a woman who intrigued him when he damn well knew better.

Sharilee had been Trehern’s woman — he hadn’t known she was a fellow agent until too late, thanks to Grosskill. And Ike…Ike was her own woman, William knew, and that wasn’t a good thing. He couldn’t trust that she’d follow his instructions when her own instincts were telling her to do something different. Hell, she’d already come close to getting herself killed. He’d be damned if he sat around while she tried again.

“That’s what happened at that meeting the other night,” Max said, nodding as he made the connection. “You didn’t want Ike to turn into another Sharilee, so you broke cover rather than risking her.”

“Yeah,” William admitted. “But I didn’t get the timing right then, either. Don’t tell Ike I said so, but she might’ve been right when she said I jumped the gun. If I’d played it cool and bluffed it out, I might’ve gotten her out safe with my cover intact.”

Because he hadn’t, she was going to be in worse danger than before, going undercover unarmed, untrained and without direct protection, damn it.

Max was quiet for a moment before he said, “Do you want to swap and have me go to the Markham Institute with Ike while you stay here and protect Raine?”

Part of William wanted to leap at the chance, wanted to divorce himself completely from all contact with Ike. But he shook his head. “No, we already discussed that. Raine needs you here — we can’t forget that she might still be a target if Odin goes out for revenge. Besides, I’m better with the surveillance stuff.” He was better with the hand-to-hand, as well, if it came down to it, but Lord knows he tried to keep that to a minimum these days. It was too easy to let the violence inside him loose, too difficult to rein it in. Still, he sighed before he said, “It makes more sense for me to be the one backing her up.”

“You going to be okay with that?” Max asked.

William lifted a shoulder and said, “I’m going to have to be. Vasek & Caine is going to go under if we don’t nail this bastard, and Ike’s already proven she’ll go after him on her own if we don’t include her.” The very thought clutched an acid burn beneath his heart.

“You got that right.” Max nodded, expression darkening. “She’s always been a bit of a bulldog, but when Zed died…it changed her. She’s harder now, more reckless than ever.”

“Great,” William muttered, though Max’s words only confirmed what he’d already figured out on his own. “That’s just what I need. A kamikaze. Well, she’d better know who’s in charge. If she thinks —”

A buzz from the outer room interrupted him, announcing visitors. With no clients scheduled, they’d locked the doors and turned on the intercom.

“That’ll be Ike and Stephen,” Max said, hitting the door release after a quick glance at the clock on William’s computer monitor. “He said they’d be here around lunchtime.”

A fist of nerves buried itself in William’s gut alongside something more, something hotter and more dangerous. He covered his reaction, tucking his hands in his pants pockets and nodding to the door. “Okay, let’s go see what they’ve come up with.”

Part of him hoped the disguise was a failure, giving him an excuse to pull the plug on her undercover aspirations. But the rest of him knew they didn’t have a workable plan B. At the moment, she was their best hope.

He left the office and headed down the hall toward the lobby, where a man’s low-pitched rumble was followed by the soft tinkle of a woman’s laughter. Stephen stood in the office lobby, his bulk making the space seem even smaller than usual. Near him, an unfamiliar woman stood with her back to the hallway, giving William a moment to take in the long honey-colored hair falling to the small of her back, the fitted white shirt and softly flowing flower-printed skirt and the shapely ankles and delicate feet strapped into embroidered sandals. For a moment he thought Raine had done something new with her hair.

Then she turned, and his breath froze in his chest.

Ike’s heart-shaped face was framed by a gentle waterfall of light-colored hair and perfectly accented with a hint of makeup. Her brown eyes were soft and liquid, and her lips were moist and color-kissed, curved in a half smile.

Lust avalanched through him, vaporizing his blood in his veins and tightening his flesh with a primal male response that simply said,
mine.

Shocked by his own reaction, William shook his head to clear it. “Ike?”

He expected her eyes to harden and her lips to form the familiar edgy smirk. Instead she tilted her head so her hair fell free of her ears, where tasteful pearl earrings gleamed, one on each lobe. “I’m sorry, you must have me confused with someone else. My name is Eleanor Roth.”

She held out her hand, and though there was nothing defiant in her expression or body language, the air between them crackled with an unspoken challenge.

William crossed the room on legs that had gone suspiciously shaky. Before he could process the impulse or stop himself, he lifted her hand and kissed it.

O
H MY
. I
KE LOOKED
down at William’s bowed head and felt a shimmer of wholly feminine warmth at the touch of his lips and the faint scrape of masculine stubble.
Don’t get too caught up in the role,
she told herself quickly, fighting to bank the heat that threatened to gather in her core.
It’s not real. None of this is real.

She pulled her hand away and reminded herself to keep her eyes soft as she glanced from William to Max. They both looked dazed, as though they’d been hit with the same blunt object.

Irritation flared. Just like the secret admirer back at Boston General who’d sent her flowers along with the suggestion that she should make more of an effort with her appearance, William and Max seemed transfixed by the sight of her in a dress.

Give a man a girlie girl in a skirt and he’s ready to trip over his tongue,
she thought bitterly.
Give him a strong woman who knows how to stand up for herself and he trips over his own feet running away.

Okay, so maybe that was a tad unfair, but she didn’t care. She didn’t like the way William was looking at her. Or, rather, she didn’t like that he was looking that way now, when he’d never even seemed to notice she was female before.

She wanted to snap at him, but she caught Stephen’s eye and saw him give a little warning head shake, reminding her to stay in character.

“Then I meet with your approval?” she asked, doing a little twirl that made the skirt flare out, showing off her calves and the place where a thin layer of flesh-toned latex covered the dragon tattoo that curled around her left ankle.

“You look better than I dared hope,” William said, then winced and added, “What I mean is that unless you trip up or Odin has full surveillance on the Kupfer lab and they’re using really good facial recognition software, we should be able to insert you no problem.”

Refusing to show the hurt that flared at the
better than I hoped
comment, Ike nodded. “Then let’s get me wired up. I’m supposed to meet Kupfer in his lab this evening for a quick get-to-know-you chat.” Under some pressure from head administrator Zach Cage, her contacts at Boston General had come through with references and a solid cover story, and William had produced all the documentation she could ask for.

Ike’s stomach tied itself in knots as she followed the men to William’s office, where he’d assembled a pile of miniaturized surveillance devices from God only knew where. This was it, she was really doing this. She was going undercover to find Zed’s killer. God, she was nervous.

But as she pressed a hand to her belly and willed her body to behave, she knew if she were being completely honest with herself she’d admit that not all of her nerves were due to her first official job in the field. A good bit of her agitation had to do with the man who paced his office with smooth, gliding strides and a fighter’s swagger and the idea that she and William would be together pretty much 24-7 for the next bunch of days.

With luck, they wouldn’t kill each other. Or worse.

G
ET A GRIP
, W
ILLIAM
told himself fiercely as he and Max worked to fit Ike with her surveillance devices.
You’re a professional.
But that was a laugh, because a pro’s hands wouldn’t shake as he wired up another pro, and he wouldn’t be too aware of each gesture, each touch. A pro wouldn’t resent Max as he fastened a microdot transmitter to Ike’s lapel and a pro wouldn’t let himself linger when the back of his hand brushed against the side of her breast.

Hell, a pro wouldn’t even notice that the other agent
had
breasts. But William was acutely aware of the woman standing in front of him, acutely aware of each indrawn breath and the rise and fall of her softly rounded flesh as he worked to conceal a small camera near her collarbone, with transmitter filaments running along the strap of her bra, which was pink and edged with a scallop of soft lace.

He glanced up, expecting to find her glaring down at him, expecting at any moment to hear her snap,
Watch the hands, buddy.
But she stood quietly, staring straight ahead, only a faint blush high on her cheekbones hinting that she’d noticed his accidental caress.

The flush made her look innocent and vulnerable, punching a hard fist beneath his breastbone. If Ike had looked eminently unapproachable and prickly in black leather and boots, now she looked vulnerable and…touchable.

“You almost done?” she inquired. Her voice carried a bit more edge than before, but when he glanced up, there was nothing in her eyes besides polite inquiry.

She was good, he admitted, partly relieved that their half-assed plan might just have a chance of succeeding, but mostly worried, because even if she played the part, he knew from experience just how many things could go wrong in a split second during an op like this one.

Not for the first time, he wished Grosskill weren’t such an unapproachable ass.

“You’re good to go,” he said, stepping back and resisting the urge to smooth down a crease in Ike’s blouse. He glanced over at Max and received an affirmative nod. “You’re wired for sight and sound, and Kupfer shouldn’t suspect a thing.” But when she moved away from him, he touched her arm, squeezing to provide emphasis when he said, “
Shouldn’t
is the operative word here. There aren’t any guarantees, Ike. If things go wrong, I might not be able to get to you in time.” He paused. “You can still back out, you know.”