Trained for Seduction (3 page)

“Nervous?” the secretary asked with a sweet smile. She was older, in her fifties, and looked motherly.

“Yes. Immensely.” Kate swallowed, glanced at the door, and back at the secretary. “I don’t think he likes me very much.”

“Chase comes off as a bear at times, but he’s a good man,” she said, cocking her head. Then she nodded, as if she remembered something. “I think he likes you more than he’d like to admit.”

“Why do you think that?” Kate blinked. She’d never met him before, not in this capacity. No one had ever mentioned him, except Jake, and that was only as a friend. So why the hell would he like her?

The secretary smiled a knowing smile. “I’m sure he’ll be with you in a moment.”

Kate frowned and the door to his office opened, but at the angle she was at, she couldn’t see the poor soul who had to suffer his presence. A peal of feminine laughter floated out, joined by Chase’s deeper laugh. My, the devil has a sense of humor.

“We’ll do lunch next week, love. What day works for you?” the woman asked in a crisp, English accent.

Kate didn’t hear Chase’s response, but the woman laughed again. Obviously, the devil could be charming, too. “I’m game for whatever you want to do. Text me.”

The woman exited, and her violet gaze met Kate’s envious one. English was tall, model thin, and beautiful, with gorgeous deep red hair, the type of woman that would work ratty sweats like a supermodel. Exactly the type of woman a man like Chase Sanders would wear on his arm like eye candy.

But she didn’t care about that, did she?

English smiled and gestured to his office. “You can go in, love. He’s waiting.”

“Thanks.” Kate rose, wiped her hands on her thighs, and went in to find Chase going through a stack of papers, intent on his work.

“Come in. Sit,” Chase commanded, no longer jovial or charming, like he’d been with the English chick. But his voice sounded more distracted than angry, so maybe she had English to thank. She set the coffee down on his desk and sat as instructed in one of the two chairs before his desk. She folded her hands on her lap to keep them from shaking.

Finally, Chase stopped shuffling. He took a sip of coffee and nodded. Then he sat back, and focused his very intent, dark gaze on her. He sat so still as he drank her in, his features perfect, and she felt like a deer in the headlights.

This man had every right to be pissed. She had kicked him in the ego, and though she believed he deserved every bit of the trouble he suffered afterwards, he didn’t deserve the pounding headache he had to have experienced the next day.

Jake had warned her about that stare. The mask of doom. She had to set him on edge, but somehow, she didn’t think she would get the chance to head-butt him again.

Finally, she could take the silence no longer.

“I’m sorry,” she blurted out, unable to keep the words back. “I really didn’t mean to knock you out. I’m sure you’re angry about it.”

“My ego is angry, but for the most part, I’ve gotten over it.” He folded his hands on his desk, a slow, deliberate movement. She could almost hear the hounds of hell being unleashed. “Why did you run?”

The hostility she’d bottled up over the past year supercharged through her veins, and suddenly she believed she held a little TNT in her heart, somewhere. He was pissed? Well, so was she. “You know why I ran.”

“I read what the debriefing had to say.” He shoved the file at her—her file. “You don’t remember right before the plane crashed, but you must remember why you ran.”

“I know what you did, damn you.” She snorted. “I lied to them when I said I didn’t remember. I remember everything my father had to say to me before the plane crashed, and I believe he said something about a certain Alexander Bishop paying a million dollars for my virginity.”

He had the decency to wince. “I feared for your safety. I was trying to get him to turn you over to me. Once you were in custody, we were going to make the deal, and the bust, and then you would have been stowed away, safely, in witness protection.”

Still, he had bought her, like she was baggage. Only now she waited to see when he’d step up to claim her. “Things didn’t work out as planned, did they?”

“No, no they didn’t.”

She looked around the office. It was nice, one she’d expect of a man of his level, all dark wood with a leather sofa behind her. “So you’re my boss. What do I call you? Master, egotistical bastard…”

The ghost of a smile played at his fine lips. The mask Jake warned her about had slipped some, and he suddenly wasn’t so imposing. “Chase works.”

“You had me fooled, you know. I thought you were some European businessman, with a wife and kids, looking for a good time.” She glared. “How old are you, anyway?”

“Thirty. Tomorrow, thirty-one. They aged me some for the mission.”

“They do that?”

“You’d be surprised what they do.” Chase shuffled papers and then sighed. “I have to apologize as well. I had no clue what your father had done to you. I had told him it was my birthday the next day, he made a phone call, and he smiled. Later, he said there was a surprise in my room. I thought you had delivered it, or perhaps you were attracted to me and you were my present, and you’d come to my room on your own. I didn’t know until I came to. I wouldn’t have raped you. I thought you were a willing participant.”

“You have women wait for you like that in your room often?”

He hesitated, looking away.

She shook her head in disgust. She thought of the English chick and wondered if she waited in his room for him, too. “Being that attractive can be an occupational hazard. Must be hard for you.”

“Sometimes.” He tossed a packet on the desk in front of her. “This is yours. A bank account in your new name. When your father died, his will left everything to you. Since Emma is dead, I had connections move the funds to this account. There is also a passport and other information all in your new name.”

She opened the packet and looked inside at the bank balance. “My God, I’m rich.” She knew she was rich. She’d managed her father’s accounts since she was twelve. But one didn’t fuel the devil’s intellect.

“Yes, you are rich. You’ll be paid, of course, for work. And for your job as a scientist when you’re not on a mission. Money has already been direct deposited. The contracts are included. I’m sure they went over what the terms were?”

“Oh, yes. They were quite clear.” She didn’t bother to look at those. She was their slave for ten years, or she could serve time in prison. Lucky, lucky her.

He nodded. “I can help you purchase a home or whatever accommodations you would require. For now, I’ll make you hotel reservations.”

She glanced up at him. She couldn’t picture him house hunting. With her. “Is that part of your job?”

“Yes. Well, making sure it gets done is part of my job.”

She looked back at another certificate—her new birth certificate. They had changed her birth date—she and Alex—no, Chase—no longer shared the same birthday.

“You’ll need to memorize this new information. Any new information—social security numbers, passports, other identification—will be issued at the onset of each assignment. For now, you are just Kate.”

Just Kate…

Chase leafed through the stack of papers and handed her a folder. “I need to know if your father ever had anything to do with this man. If he was a business associate. Hell, if he carried your groceries for you, cleaned your pool, I need to know that, too.”

“No, never.” The man in the photo was in his thirties, of Middle Eastern decent and very attractive. “May I look further?” He gave her a nod as if to say, be my guest, and she leafed through the folder. She flipped the page over and tapped a sentence. “This translation is wrong.”

“Excuse me?”

“This translation, here.” She pointed to the page written in Arabic on the back, with translations underneath each line. “It’s wrong. Here, too.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I can read Arabic.” And then she realized she hadn’t disclosed that information because Chase froze, becoming like stone. She doubted he even breathed in the seconds he took to process her lie.

Not a good way to start a work relationship. She sighed. “Since I’m guessing this, as Jake would say, is a very bad man who will soon be a part of my future, I wanted you to know your facts are wrong. I don’t want to get killed.”

“What else have you lied about?” His face was all business, cold, very calculating. Still gorgeous.

Kate stiffened. “I didn’t lie. They didn’t ask the right questions.”

He arched a perfect brow. “What did they ask, then?”

“They asked how many languages I knew, and I asked, ‘Do you mean you want to know how many languages am I fluent in?’ So I listed what I was fluent in, both speaking and reading.”

Chase blinked. “You’re not fluent in Arabic.”

“No, I can read only.” She put the file back on his desk. “I could probably get by if I had to speak it. But I’m not fluent.”

Kate wasn’t used to being looked at like she was an anomaly, but she had lived in a very sheltered environment where her intelligence level was taken in stride and nurtured. If he had any clue of what she really knew, he’d probably have a heart attack at the very young age of almost thirty-one.

She shrugged, self-conscious. “I don’t learn languages like most people. I either learn to speak them or learn to read them. I don’t learn it both ways, at the same time. It’s not how my brain works.”

He looked down at her file. “How many are you fluent in?”

“French, Japanese, Spanish, and Italian. And Portuguese, so that’s five.”

He shook his head, clicked a pen and started writing. “Any others I should know about?”

“I can speak Chinese and I can get by with the Slavic languages. But I only read Russian and Arabic competently. I was learning German before this all happened.”

“Latin?”

She snorted. “Please. It’s a dead language. But yes, I can read and write it.”

He looked at her, hard. Again came the deer-in-the-headlights feeling, and she tried to shake it off. She had to get used to his intensity if she was going to work for him.

There was a flicker of something in his eyes, and then he cleared his throat and said in Chinese, “When I finally make love to you, I will make you come so hard, you will scream my name in six languages.”

She sucked in her breath, her stomach tight, her nerve endings humming with arousal. What would she give to come that hard for him? Oh, it wasn’t good to be this attracted to the boss. Especially when he was also the devil, and probably had a girlfriend.

Kate drew in another deep breath, met his eyes, and responded in Chinese, “I am sorry, sir, but I regret to inform you I can only say egotistical bastard in two of the six.”

Chase blinked those long lashes over his intense eyes and then laughed, that right dimple deadly ammo against her willpower to keep him at arm’s length. “Oh, Kate. You’re going to be as much of a handful as Jake. But please, you need to be truthful about your level of knowledge. I can’t send you on an assignment blind on my part.”

She shook her head. “You dealt me these cards. I’m not showing you any more than I have to, because I don’t trust you. I’m not hiding anything that will endanger me, but I’m only giving you exactly what I have to give you. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

Again Chase stilled, stared. “There’s more, then.”

“Maybe.” If he only knew what she hid. But she didn’t trust him or the government enough to just blindly give everything up. They had all the control, and she had none. She didn’t elude capture from this gorgeous man by dumping her cards on the table. If she had to run again, she had to make sure he would never, ever find her.

“I don’t like that one bit, but hopefully you’ll come around.” Chase shifted, looking uncomfortable. “There’s one last thing you need to know.”

“What?” Kate had a sneaking suspicion she wasn’t going to like what he had to say one bit.

“You’re expected to attend more training sessions. With me.”

“Aren’t I lucky? What are you going to teach me? How to say egotistical bastard in the other four languages?”

“Yes.” Then Chase leaned forward, his voice barely a whisper. “Then I’m going to teach you to come, so you can scream for me.”

Kate blinked and stared at Chase across the desk, unable to believe what she just heard, a part of her wanting nothing more than for him to take her to the couch and make her a woman. A part of her was outraged that her boss would say that.

She shook with need, but found composure. “Is this another attempt to get into my pants? Because—”

“All right, bad pick up line on my part.” He sighed and looked stressed. “It’s not an attempt, trust me. It’s an order, from higher up, though I’d like nothing more than to finish what I started last year.” He ran a hand over his handsome face. “They know you’re a virgin. They want it taken care of, before your first mission.”

“You told them? And how the hell did you know, besides my father’s big mouth? How do you know I didn’t have a fling on the side?”

He still didn’t meet her gaze. “You kissed me. I knew.”

“You can’t tell what experience a woman has by how she kisses you.” Could he? “I could have run wild in the Big Apple, for all you know. Maybe that’s how I hid so long, shacking up in penthouses with rich business moguls.”

“You didn’t shack up with anyone.” Chase looked at her dead-on then, all serious. “I’ve had enough women to know when one’s never been touched the way I touched you.” He shifted, uncomfortable, his usually still shoulders flinching. “And I didn’t tell them.”

“So how did they know?”

“They had someone examine you.” He stared at the ceiling again, even more uncomfortable.

“What the fuck is wrong with you people? It’s really too archaic for me. First you buy said virginity, and they examine me? Most women don’t even have a hymen.”

“Uh, well, you did.”

“Did? They took that, too?” She slumped in her chair. Now the government had taken the only thing that was truly hers, the one thing that no one could take unless she gave it. Unless they raped her. “Is there nothing sacred?” She sat back up. “Is there anything else you know about me that I don’t know? Do I have cancer, or…I dunno. Some disease?”