Carefully, he put the roller back once again. He had toknow.
She was a pace away from him, fiddling with an unwrappedpaintbrush.
“Comehere.”
She hesitated for a moment, looking so absurdly vulnerable he wanted to tell her to forget the whole thing. Then a sparkle of determination lit her eyes and her chin came up. She took two steps until they were only inches apart. “What do you want with me this time, Agent Wheeler?” shepurred.
Now if that wasn’t a come-on, he’d never heard one. It wasn’t just the words, it was the provocative tone and the challenge in her eyes. Damn if he could figure this womanout.
Since his brain didn’t seem able to analyze her correctly, he went with his baser skills. “This,” he said softly, and bending his head, he covered her lips with hisown.
This time she didn’t freeze in shock. She merely trembled. Her lips quivered, then opened tremulously beneath his. Her body quaked when he wrapped his arms around her to pull her close. Even her breath shuddered as she sighed into hismouth.
And at that moment he knew for certain this was not a woman with a ticket booth outside her bedroomdoor.
It was his last conscious thought before his senses swamped his intellect. He couldn’t think anymore, he could only feel. Soft. She was so soft. Her lips were satin, her tongue velvet as he strokedit.
Beneath his hands, her flesh was warm andgiving.
He was mindless with need even as he recognized dimly that she wasn’t keeping up. Where he wanted to drag off their clothes and play any wild game she could think up, she was behaving like sweet sixteen on her firstdate.
Her tongue touched his shyly, her forays into his mouth like hit-and-run ops. And, contrary to having any wild games in mind, she seemed to leave everything to him. Although she clung to him, her hands tracing little circles on his back, she was pretty much staying in the area just below his shoulderblades.
Ashley, his ex, would have had them both naked and twisted like pretzels bynow.
He couldn’t explain how, but he knew this wasn’t an act. Cynthia responded to his kiss with tight-closed eyes, sweetly parted lips and not much of a clue about what to donext.
Damn it all to hell. He’d beenconned.
He pulled away and she sighed dreamily. He would have been amused at her naive reaction to a single kiss if he weren’t so furious with himself for jumping to conclusions. Okay, it had been an obvious conclusion given the circumstances of their first meeting—but he hadn’t done the most basic research to confirm hisfindings.
Now that he stopped to think about it, everything else about her was at odds with the wild lifestyle. Her driver’s license photo; her decor, until this Aladdin’s cave painting scheme—even her word choices wereprim.
She was a bit young for a midlife crisis, but all the signs were there. And the worst of it was she’d already accepted the job at Oceanic. If she were tough, street-wise and a sexual dynamo, she could be very useful to him. If she were a sheltered innocent, she could get them all introuble.
He was tempted to pull the plug. If she were a special agent picked as part of his team, he’d do it without a second thought. But she wasn’t an agent. She was a volunteer. He couldn’t force her to quit; he had to make her want to do it on herown.
He’d have to backtrack. Take back all that bunk he’d told her about the place being dangerous, and give her thetruth.
“You know,” he said, drawing back from her sweet, warm body, “I’m probably wrong about Oceanic. We’ve tried every way to find anything suspicious and we’re coming up blank. You’re basically going in on a fishingexpedition.”
Her eyes fluttered open and she blinked like a gopher coming up into sunlight. “Fishing…?” Her voice had a dreamy quality and her lips were moist and pouty from hiskisses.
He wanted nothing more than to pick up where he’d left off. But he couldn’t, not until he’d convinced his volunteer recruit to un-volunteer. “There’s probably nothing going on at Oceanic. It’s most likely just another boring accountingjob.”
She laughed softly, a sleepy, sexy sound that had him fisting his hands to keep from reaching for her again. “For nine years I’ve been an accountant in a cement factory. Goring Cement. We called it Boring Cement for goodreason.”
“I thought you wantedexcitement?”
“I do. And I think there’s something pretty fishy going on atOceanic.”
If it wasn’t a serious matter of drug running, he’d find her earnestness kind of cute. “You were there about fiveminutes.”
“I have good instincts about people. The two men who were with the president were definitely suspicious-lookingcharacters.”
“That’snot—”
“And besides,” she interrupted, “I really needed a change. If this doesn’t turn out to be exciting, I’ll quit and find something more interesting. The important thing is that I took charge of mylife.”
