Kitabı oku: «You've Got Male», sayfa 2

Dixon picked up one of the more primitive tools he had at his fingertips—a pad and pencil—and listened as Avery Nesbitt, aka Daisy Miller, ticked off a list of essentials that she needed delivered to the very building where Dixon had parked his van. And then Mohammed confirmed that those should go to apartment number—Oh, yes, there is a God—7B, right? Yes, thanks, Mohammed, and please charge it to my account, as usual. And add fifteen percent for the delivery boy, twenty if he can deliver it tonight, ’cause I’m really running low on milk. He can? Great. Thanks again, Mohammed, you’re the best.

Avery Nesbitt. Dixon smiled at the words he’d scrawled on the pad of paper before him. Not Daisy Miller. And this week, from the market, Avery Nesbitt needed coffee, bread, peanut butter—the biggest jar you have, please, Mohammed—Froot Loops, Cap’n Crunch, a box of Chicken in a Biskit crackers, a six-pack of Wild Cherry Pepsi, some of those red-chili pistachios, a mondo bag of M&M’s, Sausalito cookies, tampons (she’d said that without an ounce of hesitation) and lots and lots of other stuff that had the nutritional equivalent of a big bag of lint.

Awful lot of caffeine and sugar on her list, Dixon reflected as he read his hastily jotted notes. Evidently Avery Nesbitt lived on nothing but carbohydrates. Which went a long way toward explaining why she stayed up all night, every night, the way she always did. And he found himself wondering what a woman could possibly have to do all night when she was home alone.

“Not playin’ Parcheesi, that’s for sure,” he muttered to himself.

And then he came to the last notation he’d made: Delivery tonight. That meant some guy would be bopping down the street very soon with a couple of big grocery sacks from the Eastern Star Earth-Friendly Market destined for Ms. Avery Nesbitt of apartment 7B.

Which gave Dixon an idea he really had no business entertaining.

He contacted Cowboy again, but this time it wasn’t to tell the man he was calling it a night. No, this time what Dixon told Cowboy was—

“I’m going in.”

“What?” the other man said.

“I’m going in,” he repeated.

“You’re coming in?” Cowboy asked. “It’s that boring?”

“Not coming in,” Dixon corrected him, “going in.”

“You mean going in as in…going in?”

Dixon smiled. “Yeah. I just a got a nice bit of intelligence and I want to follow up on it.”

“So you’re going in…where?”

Dixon rolled his eyes. Newbies. “To meet our girl,” he said.

“She-Wolf is back?” Cowboy asked, voicing the code name of Dixon’s regular partner and sounding very confused. “What’s she doing in New York? I thought she went home to Las Vegas to see her mother.”

“Not She-Wolf,” Dixon said. “Our other girl. Sorcerer’s contact.”

“Daisy Miller?”

“That’s the one.”

“But you can’t,” Cowboy said. “You don’t even know which apartment she’s in.”

“I do now. I told you. I just received some very nice intelligence. And it’s from an excellent source.” Himself. What better source could there be?

“Then you pass the intelligence along to me, Dixon,” Cowboy instructed. “And I figure out what to do with it. Assimilate, evaluate, articulate—that’s my job. And you don’t go in until I say it’s safe. Hell, you don’t go in, period, unless you’re the field agent.”

“But I am the field agent,” he reminded the other man, suddenly grateful for that anomaly.

“But you’re not supposed to be in the field,” Cowboy reminded him right back.

“Hey, I didn’t ask for this assignment,” Dixon said with all the mock innocence he could muster. “But you know how conscientious I am about doing my work the right way.”

“The hell you are. You’re as conscientious about that as I am.”

“And I want to make sure this job gets done right.”

“No, Dixon, you—”

“So I’m going in to make contact,” he told the other man finally. “I’ll let you know what happens when I get back.” He smiled to himself. No reason not to mess with the newbie a little. It was so much fun to hear them shriek. “If I come back alive, I mean.”

“What?” Cowboy shrieked.

“Wish me luck,” he said into the microphone before removing the headset altogether.

Not that that prevented him from hearing more shrieking.

“This is nuts, Dixon,” Cowboy told him. “Don’t go in there if it’s dangerous. You’re not even a field agent. You’re supposed to monitor the machines and analyze the data, like me. If anyone goes in to make contact, it should be She-Wolf. Wait for her before proceeding any further. She’ll be back in a couple of weeks. She’s the field agent. You don’t know what to do. You don’t know proper procedure.”

Oh, the hell he didn’t. He’d helped write the proper procedure. He’d been an OPUS agent when Cowboy was still fine-tuning his small motor skills.

“Dixon, I’m begging you,” Cowboy implored him. But he sounded resigned now. “You can’t go in. Please. You don’t have permission.”

Dixon chuckled as he flipped up the collar of his leather jacket and reached for the handle of the van’s side door.

No permission. Right. As if that had ever stopped him before.

CHAPTER TWO

AVERY WAS TOTALLY IMMERSED in creating the code to make her farewell gift to Andrew especially noxious when the doorbell rang and blew her concentration. When she glanced at the clock in the corner of her laptop computer screen, she saw that it was 4:08 a.m. Who on earth came calling at 4:08 in the morning? For that matter, who came calling at all? She hadn’t had any visitors to her apartment since…never. That was one of the things that happened when—cue the dramatic music in a minor key—debutantes go bad.

Then she remembered the groceries she’d ordered earlier. Duh. She really needed those tampons.

Saving the work she’d completed to her hard drive, Avery rose and made her way to the front door, switching on lights as she went, because she normally worked in the dark. She also launched herself into a full-body stretch, wondering how long she had been sitting still. It hadn’t been midnight yet when she’d started working, so more than four hours. Still, she’d gotten a lot done. In fact, she was doing a better job than she usually did for something like this, despite the fact that it had been years since she’d put one of these things together. Funny how productive you could be when someone pissed you off real bad.

Before opening the front door, she peeked through the peephole, frowning when the guy on the other side turned out to be neither Eddie, the usual night delivery guy, nor Mohammed, who from time to time made deliveries himself. Nor did the man out there look like someone who would make his living delivering groceries in the first place. No, thanks to his enormous size—although he was distorted by the fish-eye, he was clearly bigger than the average national monument—he seemed more like the kind of guy who would make his living as a longshoreman. Or a bouncer. Or a wrestler. Or a Mack truck.

Wow, just how bad was the economy, she wondered, if guys who looked like him were reduced to delivering groceries? Maybe she should start visiting CNN.com from time to time and see what was going on outside the walls of her apartment. Not that she really cared, quite frankly, but she was still a citizen of this state, even if she would have preferred to live in a different one. Like maybe the state of altered consciousness. Nice scenery there.

In spite of her misgivings about the delivery guy, Avery figured he must be legit because he was toting two brown grocery sacks with the Eastern Star Earth-Friendly Market logo on them. Pulling herself back from the peephole, she unfastened the four dead bolts and chain that she routinely kept locked in place, then dragged her front door open.

Holy cow. He was even bigger without the distortion of the fish-eye, she saw when she glimpsed the man in person. And now he really didn’t seem like someone who would be delivering groceries for a living. Once she got a better look at his face, Avery decided he was more the kind of guy whose job would involve being onstage somewhere—probably stripping down to his altogether while hundreds of screaming, frantic women stuffed their grocery money into his G-string. He was staggeringly handsome, from his finely wrought mouth to his ruggedly chiseled cheekbones to his aristocratic nose to his oh-my-God eyes.

But somehow Avery suspected the harshness of his features belied good breeding, since she had more than a nodding acquaintance with that—both good breeding and harshness. In spite of his tattered attire, he held himself as if he were someone who knew the rules and regulations of proper dress—he just chose not to abide by them. There was a strange mixture of majesty and menace about him, as if he would have been equally comfortable wielding a martini at a high-society function or breaking someone’s knuckles as an enforcer for the mob.

It was his eyes, though, that she found most unsettling. An icy, almost opaque green, they made her think of the deepest part of the ocean—where swam the most mysterious, dangerous creatures—frozen over. Instead of repelling her, however, the look in his eyes made her want to draw closer to him. But it wasn’t just his good looks that generated such a response in her. It simply had been so long since Avery had experienced the simple pleasure of being close to a man physically. Especially one who looked like him.

“Where do you want these?” he asked without preamble.

Automatically she jutted a thumb over her shoulder. “In the kitchen. Please,” she added as an afterthought, nearly forgetting the good manners that had been hammered into her during her years of after-school etiquette and deportment classes at Madame Yvette’s School for Genteel Young Ladies in East Hampton. “Thanks,” she added with some distraction. Wow. His eyes really were amazing. And the overly long black hair spilling out from beneath the driving cap he’d turned backward on his head only made their color seem that much lighter…and that much darker, too.

But the guy didn’t follow her instructions, only stood on the other side of the door gazing back at her. Incisively enough that she began to feel disconcerted, a feeling she really hated. In fact, it had been years since she had felt disconcerted, and she’d almost convinced herself she was incapable of feeling that anymore. Along with discomfort and shame and humiliation and all those other things that had once been her constant companions. The realization that this man, simply by showing up at her front door, could rouse even one of them—and so quickly, too, damn him—bothered her a lot.

She was about to snap another order at him when he inclined his head forward and said, “Do you mind?”

“Mind what?” she asked.

“Uh, stepping aside?” he told her. “So I can get through.”

Only then did Avery realize that he hadn’t come forward because she was blocking his way by standing there stupidly ogling him. Gee, had she felt disconcerted before? That was nothing compared to the mortification she felt now. Especially since she was leering at him again, thanks to the velvety pitch of his voice, a sound that skimmed over her like rough-calloused fingertips on naked flesh.

Oh, yeah. She’d definitely gone too long without physical closeness to the opposite sex if she was thinking a man’s request for her to step aside was the equivalent of foreplay. Good foreplay, at that.

“Oh. I’m sorry,” she apologized, moving to the side. “I…You’ll have to excuse me. I was working. My mind is still elsewhere.” Like on how the sound of your voice was making me orgasmic. “The kitchen is through there,” she added, pointing in that direction.

He sauntered past her, and she pushed the front door closed before following. As nice as his front side had been, Avery had to admit that the view from the rear—especially of his rear—was almost nicer. The faded jeans hugged his taut buttocks as snugly as Saran wrap—would that they were as transparent, too—swathing his lean thighs and calves. The leather of his jacket was cracked white in enough places to give it character, his shoulders broad and strong and hard-looking beneath it.

She bit back an involuntary sigh. She’d always loved a man’s back more than any other feature, liked how the muscles there were dense and plentiful and elegant and how the skin was smooth and warm and fine. She could have been perfectly content for days lying next to a naked man doing little more than running her open palm over his back. This man’s naked back, she was certain, would be spectacular.

When they entered her kitchen, she marveled at how much the room seemed to shrink with his presence. Funny, but she’d always considered the room to be larger than what most apartments in the city claimed. Unfortunately it was also messier than most apartments in the city, cluttered with empty cereal boxes and crumbled pretzel and potato-chip bags and dirty dishes that she hadn’t gotten around to putting into the dishwasher. Mostly because she hadn’t taken the clean dishes out.

Well, she’d been busy. Working. She had lots of work to do these days. Not to mention she was inherently lazy. In any event, there wasn’t even enough clear counter space for him to set down the groceries, so she muttered another apology and waved him toward the door that led to the dining room.

“Just put them on the table in there,” she said as she watched him head that way.

Where, she recalled belatedly, she had been working on Andrew’s gift, which was still sitting out in the open, where anybody could see it and get her into big, big trouble.

She started to call him back, then decided that if he was delivering groceries for a living, there was little chance he’d recognize what she was putting together on her laptop. So she let him go, crossing her arms over her midsection as she waited for him to return.

And waited. And waited. And waited.

Finally Avery took a few steps toward the other door and called out, “Is there something wrong?”

When she heard what sounded like the shuffling of paper, she bolted toward the dining room in a panic. She halted at the door, however, when she saw the delivery guy down on all fours, scooping up a sheaf of papers that he’d evidently spilled to the floor when he’d set the groceries down on the table.

“Oh, man, I’m sorry,” he said as he tried to straighten one piece of paper on top of another. “I knocked this stuff off when I set down one of the sacks. I hope I didn’t mess up anything you were working on.”

Only when her heart stopped slamming against her rib cage did Avery realize just how hard it had been pounding. Enough to make her light-headed. Though, truth be told, that might have been due to the fact that the delivery guy’s adorable butt was facing her, and bent over the way he was, she had an almost uncontrollable urge to go over there and sink her teeth into it.

Hoo-boy, she had to get out and meet some flesh-and-blood men. Though that might be a little difficult, since she was overcome with terror every time she even stepped out into the hallway. As it was, she tipped Billy the doorman to bring her mail up to her every day.

She gave herself a minute to calm down, then joined the delivery guy on the floor, gathering the papers closest to her. “Don’t worry about it,” she told him. “I was finished with that pile.”

It became clearer to Avery why he was working in the job he was as he tried to help her clean up. For every piece of paper she collected, he seemed to lose three, and although he tried to keep them in order as he gathered them, he kept turning them first one way, then another, as if he couldn’t tell which way they were supposed to go.

“Here,” she said gently, taking pity on him. “That’s okay. I’ll do it.”

He threw her a grateful smile and stood up, and within a few moments Avery had taken care of the mess herself. When she stood, the delivery guy was staring at her laptop, frowning at the lines of code that would be incoherent gibberish to anyone who wasn’t familiar with computer programming. He looked over at her and shrugged, smiling an “Oh, well” kind of smile.

“You must be one ’a them computer programmers,” he said.

“Kind of,” she told him evasively.

“I don’t know nothin’ ’bout computers myself. ’Cept how to send e-mail. And even then, a lotta times I’ll screw it up.”

She tried to smile reassuringly. “Well, that’s true for a lot of people. It can be confusing.”

He nodded enthusiastically. “Sure can.” He looked at the screen again, then thrust his chin toward it. “Just what’re you doin’ there anyway?” he asked.

Instinctively Avery moved to the laptop to protect her work, and even though her visitor clearly couldn’t find his megabyte from a hole in the ground, something told her to close the lid and hurry him on his way. Why was he hanging around anyway? she wondered. He’d get his tip from Mohammed when he returned, and she’d be billed for it. That was the way it always worked. Maybe Mohammed hadn’t explained that to him yet. This guy was probably new to the job, since Avery had never seen him before.

“Uh, it’s just something I’m working on for someone,” she hedged, pushing the top down on the computer as unobtrusively as she could. “Look, I told Mohammed to add your tip to the bill, since I don’t keep any money in the house,” she added.

The comment seemed to invite mischief, and Avery wanted more than ever to get the guy out of her apartment. He seemed nice enough, and Mohammed always did a thorough background check on his employees, but even guys who were easy on the eye could turn out to be anything but easy.

“Thanks for making the delivery so late,” she added, hoping that might spur him on.

But he didn’t take the hint, only stood on the other side of the table gazing at her, as if she were something worth gazing at. Which was the most alarming thing of all, because dressed as she was, in her obnoxious pajamas and her least attractive glasses, with her hair in two long braids, she looked like Pippi Longstocking on crystal meth. If he was staring at her, it wasn’t because he liked what he saw.

“Thanks again,” she said a little less amiably. “I appreciate it.” When he still made no move to leave, she added, “I’ll see you out.”

Then she turned to make her way back to the front door, completing the journey without looking back once, and was relieved when the delivery guy followed her. But his pace was slow and relaxed, as if he were in no hurry, and somehow that made Avery want to hurry even more. Although his hands were shoved carelessly into the pockets of his jacket, she couldn’t help worrying that there might be something else in those pockets that could be potentially harmful to her. Like, oh…she didn’t know…a gun, perhaps. Or a knife. Some rope, maybe. Or duct tape.

Amazing all the dangerous things that would fit easily into a man’s jacket pocket, she marveled. Though somehow she suspected his hands would be the most dangerous weapon of all.

He was starting to look menacing again, and it occurred to her how truly isolated she was in her life. She didn’t know any of her neighbors and honestly wasn’t sure if any of them would respond to an anguished cry in the night. Not that they’d even hear an anguished cry this time of night, because they were probably all asleep, as normal people were at four-something in the morning.

And if something terrible did happen to her, who would she turn to in the fallout? Avery hadn’t spoken to anyone in her family for nearly a decade, and she didn’t kid herself that something like an assault or molestation on her part would change that. On the contrary, were her person to be violated, it would just make the rest of the family that much more determined to avoid her. The Nesbitts of East Hampton were still trying to rebuild their social standing in the wake of their youngest child’s exploits. She doubted they’d even send flowers to her funeral.

Her mouth went dry at the thought of her funeral. Or maybe it was because her visitor came to a halt in front of her with scarcely a breath of air separating them. If he did decide to be menacing instead of majestic, he could easily overpower her and no one would be the wiser.

Oh, who was she kidding? He could choose to be majestic, too, and she’d still end up a puddle of ruined womanhood at his feet.

Her heart was hammering hard in her chest again, but surprisingly it wasn’t because she felt threatened by him. No, what Avery was feeling was infinitely more dangerous and more potent than fear. What she was feeling was hunger, plain and simple. And it wasn’t for the bags of groceries this guy had just delivered. It was for an altogether different sort of package that he had.

Without thinking, she dropped her gaze to the package in question and saw that his jeans hugged him there as intimately as they did elsewhere. And it was a very nice package indeed. When she realized what she was doing, she snatched her gaze back up again, forcing herself to look at his face. But he was smiling at her in a way that told her he knew exactly what she’d been looking at. Worse, he knew she liked what she saw.

“Thanks again,” she said as she pulled the front door open and moved behind it. But the words came out sounding breathless and needy and in no way grateful.

“Anytime,” he told her as he took a few steps forward. But he halted at the threshold and turned to look at her one last time. Then he lifted a hand to his forehead in something of a salute and smiled at her. “And, sweetheart, I do mean anytime,” he said before leaving.

Avery slammed the door closed behind him with no attempt to be subtle about it, thrusting all four dead bolts into place as quickly as she could and hooking the chain back tight. Then she leaned against it, her arms thrown wide over it, as if her too-slim, one-hundred-and-twenty-pound body could actually hold back two hundred towering pounds of solidly packed male.

Strangely, though, she hadn’t taken those precautions because she feared he might come back and ravish her. It was because she was afraid she’d run after him and beg for it.

SHE SMELLED LIKE PEACHES.

That was the thought circling with the most frequency around Dixon’s brain thirty minutes after meeting Avery Nesbitt in the flesh. Not the fact that her attire was the sort of thing normally worn by people who’d sustained a severe head trauma. Nor that she hadn’t had a qualm about inviting a total stranger into her apartment, never mind that the stranger was carrying groceries she’d ordered—hell, any Tom, Dixon or Harry could have slipped the real delivery boy a Benjamin out on the street and intercepted those groceries to gain entry into her apartment for nefarious purposes. Nor had Dixon been thinking about what a major slob she was. Or about how she’d actually seemed kind of nice, taking pity on the clumsy delivery boy the way she had and cleaning up the guy’s mess.

He wasn’t even thinking most about how, judging by the collection of letters and numbers and symbols he’d seen on her laptop screen, she was trying to take over the world. No, what Dixon was thinking about most was that Avery Nesbitt smelled like peaches.

And, hey, she might not have been trying to take over the entire world. Maybe what she was working on up there was just a sinister little hobby of hers, something she’d keep to herself and not unleash on an unsuspecting planet.

But she was building a monster up there.

And not one of those lame rubber-suited monsters that stomps all over Tokyo, either. No, the beast Avery was building could potentially wipe out life as they knew it from Alaska to Zambia.

Damn, she really was good, he thought as he sat in the darkened van and reviewed the episode in her apartment one more time. And now he could really see why Sorcerer wanted to hook up with her. If not sexually—there was still that small matter of her wardrobe—then certainly in a way that was even more useful to Sorcerer.

Dixon hadn’t been able to see a lot of what was on the laptop before he’d heard her approaching the dining room and knocked the papers to the floor in an effort to hide his snooping. But even the quick glimpse he’d been able to steal had told him a lot. What Avery Nesbitt was doing in the privacy of her own home was something that could potentially have worldwide repercussions. Because Avery Nesbitt was creating a virus. Not some cute little virus that spread from person to person with a simple achoo, but a fast-traveling and highly contagious computer virus that could wipe out any PC it came into contact with.

Even from the little Dixon had seen, there was nothing to rival it. Unless he sat down to dissect and analyze it, he wasn’t sure there would be a cure for it. He’d practically fallen in love with her on the spot, so massive was his admiration for her skill. Until he’d remembered that she was a menace to society, wherein his ardor had quickly cooled.

But it had risen to the fore again during that last odd exchange they’d shared just before he’d left her apartment. Okay, so she wasn’t what any man in his right mind would call beautiful. In those ridiculous pajama bottoms and that shapeless sweatshirt, he hadn’t been able to discern a single feminine attribute. Although she appeared to have a thick, glossy mane of blue-black hair, she’d been wearing it in a style he hadn’t seen on any female over the age of twelve. And she’d seemed to select her glasses frames for the sole purpose of birth control. But the eyes behind those glasses…

Oh, baby.

Huge and round and bluer than the sky above. And hungry. They’d been hungry eyes and they’d raked over Dixon as if he were a surf and turf carried to a death-row inmate the night before her execution. He’d nearly burst into flame when she’d looked at him the way she had. It had been all he could do not to respond to that look, just to see if maybe peaches were as sweet in the dead of winter as they were during the torrid heat of summer. One touch, he’d figured. That was all it would have taken. If he’d touched her one time, the right way, in the right place, Avery Nesbitt would have been his for the night.

Because damn, Dixon was good, too.

He figured she would need at least another day to finish what she was working on, and even then he really did have no evidence to suggest she was planning to put it into circulation. Could be she just had a really bizarre, twisted hobby building computer viruses and then sitting back to admire them.

But he doubted it.

In his experience, people who made viruses only did so for one reason: to send them out into the world and laugh hysterically at all the damage they wrought. And if Avery Nesbitt was involved with Sorcerer, that only made the threat ten times more menacing.

So Dixon had less than a day to find out everything he could about Avery Nesbitt and do whatever he had to do to stop her. He wasn’t going to waste a moment of it hanging around outside her apartment building doing surveillance. Not when he’d learned enough about her tonight to uncover everything about her. But he needed to be at OPUS to do that, with his computer and his networks and his contacts.

He climbed into the front of the van and turned the key and thought again about the peachy scent of Avery Nesbitt. Then he threw the vehicle into gear and drove away. He glanced once into the rearview mirror as he waited for a signal at the corner to change, at the pale blue glow from a computer screen that was barely visible in the window of what he now knew was Avery Nesbitt’s dining room.

She was still at work on her monster. And Dixon was quite possibly the only human being who knew how to stop her.

IT WAS PAST HIS LUNCH hour when he finally took a break, if for no other reason than that he needed to refuel before taking his findings to his superior or he’d get woozy from sheer exhilaration. If Dixon didn’t get a major promotion out of this—to nothing less than Exalted Supreme Sovereign of Every Damned Thing There Is—then there was no justice in the world.

Avery Nesbitt was going to be quite a catch.

And Dixon was going to be the one to catch her.

His head swam with his findings as he blindly selected food from the company cafeteria and paid for it. The headquarters for the Office of Political Unity and Security were in Washington, D.C., but the organization had field offices in a handful of major cities: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Miami. Dixon normally worked out of D.C., but his search for Sorcerer had taken him and his partner She-Wolf to a half-dozen cities in the past year. He was no stranger to New York, though, having earned his master’s degree from Columbia University. Nevertheless, he’d had little opportunity to enjoy himself since his return.

Yeah, he was going to enjoy bringing in Avery Nesbitt for questioning, even if he had to bring her in kicking and screaming.

As he ate his lunch without tasting a bite of it, Dixon connected and divided and reconnected all his discoveries in his brain. She was a fascinating piece of work. But as much as he’d learned about her over the past several hours, he still couldn’t get to the core of her—her motivation. Everybody was motivated by something. Something that had happened to them, or something that they wanted or something that they needed. Motivation defined who a person was. Dixon was no different. He understood his motivation perfectly. But Avery Nesbitt…

He couldn’t figure her out.

There had to be a reason for why she had done the things she’d done and there had to be a reason for why she lived the way she did now—which was an odd way to live indeed. But there was nothing in her background that even hinted at what motivated her. It had only made her that much more intriguing to Dixon.