Overnight Male Read Free Page B

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
    J OEL F ARADAY 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, whiskey-voiced 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