Overkill (The Mammoth Book of Special Ops) Read Free

caught his interest. Tilting his head slightly, he said, “You got your law degree then—along with your MBA.”
    “Yes.” The abrupt change in subject from his work to hers took her mind off the document she’d already started composing in her head.
    He half-smiled, and said in a low voice, “Hell... That’s really something. You’re something. Beautiful and brainy. That’s what I call a killer combination.” There was a trace of awe in his tone.
    Laine should call his comments out-of-line—she was his boss after all—but instead, caught in the lingering warmth of his curved lips and warm eyes, she reddened. She was suddenly very, very curious. “And you, Tanner? What have you been doing all these years?”
    The smile left his face, like a ghost turning from the light. Rapping on his side window with his knuckle, he said, “Looks like we’re here.”
    He was right. There was no mistaking Harrods’ green canopies. Collier pulled the car to the curb.
    When Tanner put his hand on the door handle, Laine put her hand on his bare arm.
    Heat. A fine spray of hair. Hard muscle.
    Swallowing, her fingers tingling, she pulled her hand back.   “My question wasn’t an interrogation. Just... friendly interest.”
    He smiled again, but this time it was fuller, and when paired with his eyes, bordered on mockery. “‘Friendly interest?’ I don’t think so.” He looked down to where her hand had briefly rested on his arm, then lifted his gaze to her. A gaze both seductive and impenetrable. A gaze that offered and took away. A gaze that made her heart pound and her brain soften. A gaze that saw a dangerous road ahead and... didn’t give a damn. “You and I will never be friends, Laine.”
    “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, stuffy as a parson’s wife. She knew exactly what he meant, but some obscure instinct said the game had to be played, surface words spread like a cool cloth on a fevered brow.
    But the words were useless against Tanner’s hot blue eyes. “Yes, you do.”
    “I—”
    “Don’t worry. I’m not putting a move on you. And I won’t. You’re the boss, so we do things your way.” His stare speculative, he added, “If we do them at all.”
    With that he was out of the limo and striding into Harrods.
    Breathing deeply, she watched his broad back disappear, her normally logical mind numbed by possibilities.
    Tanner Cross as a lover. After all these years...
    That thought ended her efforts at deep breathing and set off heart palpitations. Dear goddess, where were the smelling salts when she needed them!
    His words echoed. “You’re the boss...”
     

     
    Tanner cursed himself and then he cursed Laine Derek. Himself for losing his grip on whatever cool he’d managed to salvage from the jungle and panting after a woman he hadn’t seen in years, and her for turning out to be exactly what he’d expected—the woman who’d starred in his adolescent fantasies, and quite few since then.
    Not that she knew it, nor would he tell her, but it hadn’t been fifteen years since he’d seen her. No. He’d clapped eyes on her twice in the last six years. Cairo first, then Madrid last year. She’d made his knees weak then, and she did the same now. Not good, considering his current job description, and the fact that he was as far from being Laine’s type as a lion was from a Siamese cat.
    So shut the fuck up, Cross, and quit with the sex signals. Get yourself some working clothes and get away from her as fast as your ass will move.
    The menswear department was on the ground floor, so he headed straight for it.
    He pulled a half dozen white shirts off the rack, found a clerk, told him his sizes, and asked him to bring him three suits, one navy and two black, whatever ties would work, and some dress shoes – his feet hurt just thinking about them – and to toss in some jeans and underwear while he was at it.
    After a double-take on Tanner’s African-market-chic outfit, the clerk gave him a