Overnight Male

“Then you know everything I know.”

“Reports only cover the facts,” he said. “Not gut feelings. Not impressions. Not theories. So what are your gut feelings, impressions and theories on this thing?”

Faraday didn’t need to identify the thing any more than he had. Adrian Padgett had been the focus of Lila’s job for some time. Before she’d come along, he’d been arguably OPUS’s best agent. He’d operated by his own rules, to be sure—kind of like Lila, come to think of it—but he’d still stayed within the parameters of Doing the Right Thing. OPUS itself often bent its own rules to ensure political unity and security, so no one had really bothered to rein in Sorcerer, even when he started overstepping those parameters. He always collected exceptionally good intel, always bagged the bad guys, always got the job done. So who cared how he went about it?

Eventually, though, he began to stray so far beyond the parameters that there was no coming back. Several years ago Sorcerer had decided to become a free agent of sorts, and blackmailed the organization who employed him, threatening to expose it and many of its agents if he wasn’t paid millions of dollars and left alone. Had he not been such a good agent, the threat would have been laughable. OPUS was built on a framework of secrets—so many secrets that there were few in the organization who could honestly describe how it all worked.

With Sorcerer, though, as good as he was, the risk was too great to ignore the threat. Even so, before OPUS could amass the cash necessary to pay him off, Sorcerer leaked enough information to compromise dozens of assignments and agents. One assignment was so badly compromised, in fact, that the agent completing it ended up dead. Maybe the man hadn’t died by Sorcerer’s hand, but he’d died by Sorcerer’s actions. The agent had been the father of Lila’s regular partner, so there was a bit of personal vendetta involved in her desire to catch him, too.

She was surprised Faraday would want to know about her gut feelings and impressions and theories with regard to the assignment, since facts alone were the lifeblood of an archivist’s existence. There were twelve OPUS archivists in all, all headquartered here in Washington, and it was their job to keep records of every assignment ever conducted by OPUS. They were the ones who completed the final analysis and wrote up the final reports for every assignment. They looked at what went right and what went wrong during an operation and figured out why. Then they filed it all away somewhere, in case there was ever a need to reference a case again.

A case like, oh, say…Sorcerer. That guy probably had more paper and megabytes assigned to him than any other agent or event in OPUS’s history.

“You want to know my gut feelings about Sorcerer?” Lila asked. “My impressions? My theories?”

“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want to know,” Faraday replied.

She nodded. “Then maybe I’ll have that tea after all. And you might want to refill that cognac. And make yourself a sandwich. This could take a while.”

CHAPTER TWO

JOEL FARADAY ENJOYED another taste of his cognac and watched the woman handcuffed to his bed daintily sip tea from the mug in her unbound hand. He hadn’t bothered with a sandwich. Something else he’d heard about Lila Moreau, code name She-Wolf, was that she minced partners, not words. Despite her assurances to the contrary, this wouldn’t take long. And he was reasonably certain he should keep at least one hand free at all times.

She wasn’t what he’d expected. He’d been hearing about her for years, just like everyone else who worked for OPUS, but the stories had made her sound like a larger-than-life legend. A brisk, brassy bombshell with a big mouth, bigger cojones and no moral fiber to speak of. A woman who put the job before anything and did anything to get the job done. Joel had pegged her as a tall, voluptuous siren, whiskeyvoiced and two-pack-a-day redolent, with the hard eyes of a woman who was edgy and brittle and coarse.

Instead, she looked like the girl next door. Small in stature, slender in frame, pretty more than beautiful in an almost wholesome-looking way. She’d removed her knit cap, and a mass of pale blond hair now cascaded down to her shoulders, scooped back from her face with a careless hand. Although the clingy fit of her clothing revealed some very nice curves, she was by no means the bump-and-grind type. Her voice was a clear, euphonic tenor, and as he’d wrestled with her on the bed, he’d noted the faint scent of lavender about her. As for her eyes…

Well, now. The eyes were certainly something. A clear sapphire-blue that shoved Joel completely off balance. Her eyes were indeed the stuff of legend. With them, he could see how Lila Moreau had earned her rep as a woman who could glean just about anything she wanted from any man she wanted, be it information or something else entirely.

But he detected no edge to her, nothing bitter or coarse. She didn’t even seem all that brassy, truth be told, threats to kick his ass notwithstanding. She’d spoken of that as if it were a simple statement of fact, which, he had to admit, it probably was.

Nevertheless, the realization that this woman, who was a good foot shorter than he and probably almost half his weight, had earned herself a bona fide, justified reputation as the most dangerous woman in the world certainly gave a man pause.

The jury was still out on the moral fiber thing—she had, after all, broken in to his house for the express purpose of imprisoning him and showing him who was boss—but he was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Besides, morality, like so many things, was relative—and fluid. His own moral history being what it was, he was the last person to make a judgment call on something like that.

He’d managed to leave her tea on the nightstand closest to her without losing a limb, so he figured they were off to a pretty good start. Still, he’d completed the action in record time and immediately retreated to the opposite side of the room when he was done. Now he leaned back in his wooden desk chair with an ominous creak, swirled his cognac in its snifter and never once took his eyes off Lila Moreau.

Instead of offering him the information he’d requested of her a little while ago, however, she asked him a question of her own. “Do you know exactly where Sorcerer is right now?”

“I haven’t pinpointed his exact position, no,” Joel admitted. “But I’ve gotten pretty close.”

“And do you know what he’s doing?”

He shook his head. “Not really. That’s your job.”

She nodded. “And I’ve done my job. I know exactly what Sorcerer is doing.”

Her intimation being, of course, that Joel hadn’t done his job, since he didn’t know exactly where Sorcerer was. Not that he cared about impressing her. Although it might come as a shock to Lila Moreau, she wasn’t the one in charge of this operation. Nor was she the most important cog in the machine. Naturally, he didn’t tell her that. He only said, “You didn’t include your discovery in your report.”

“That’s because it’s a theory,” she said.

Joel narrowed his eyes at her. “You just told me you know it for a fact.”

“No, I said I know exactly what he’s up to.”

“But—”

“I just don’t have any proof. Yet.”

He leaned back in his chair again. “Then you don’t know exactly what he’s up to. Like you said, it’s still a theory.”

She set her tea back on the nightstand and met his gaze defiantly. “No, it isn’t.”

“But you just said—”

“I know exactly what he’s doing,” she repeated.

“You can’t know for sure if you don’t have proof.”

“Yes, I can.”

“No, you can’t.”

“Yes. I can.”

“No. You can’t.”

“Can.”

“Can’t.”

“Look, Faraday—”

“Call me Joel.”

He could practically see her back go up when he said it.

Obviously she didn’t like addressing her coworkers by their first names. Or, more likely, she resented being told what to do. Which was too damned bad. Because Joel was going to be giving her a lot of instruction in the days ahead. And she’d sure as hell have to get used to following orders.

“Virtuoso,” she amended, using his code name instead.

Which was strange to hear spoken aloud, since archivists were a pretty chummy bunch and rarely referred to each other by their code names. They were supposed to do so in professional situations, but…They were left so much to their own devices that over the years they’d splintered off into their own group within the organization, with their own practices and policies. Joel and the other archivists just weren’t as formal as the rest of OPUS.

But fine, he and Lila could compromise on this one. Compromises weren’t such bad things. Joel just liked being the one who offered them, not the one who agreed to go along with them. He’d be magnanimous. This time.

“Whatever,” he replied, telling himself he did not sound ungracious when he said it.

She grinned at him, smugly, and it surprised Joel how much he wanted to walk over to the bed and do something about that smugness. What surprised him even more was that the something he wanted to do was in no way professional. He’d learned a long time ago to temper his knee-jerk reactions and not to let his emotions get the better of him. Lila, he was beginning to realize, could jerk a hell of a lot more than a man’s knee. And he didn’t want to think about what she could potentially do to a man’s emotions.