He took another drink of beer, then draped his strong, beautiful hands comfortably on the steering wheel as they headed into the infinite flatness of the empty countryside. His eyes seemed to be on the road but she knew he was somehow managing to watch her. Maybe he had fabulous peripheral vision or hidden mirrors; somehow he was acutely aware of her every expression. Which meant she had to be more circumspect, or he’d catch her looking at him like a love-starved kitten . . .
Where the hell had that idea come from? Too much beer—probably because she’d had so little to eat in the last few days. There was no place to set the bottle, but she needed to be careful, not let maudlin emotions interfere.
“Tell me who you work for,” she said abruptly. “That’s a real question. If you feel like throwing in your real name free of charge that would be nice, but it’s not an official question.”
He waited so long that for a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. She’d almost given up hope when he spoke, reluctantly. “I work for an organization called the Committee. They’re based out of London, but they’re planning on setting up an American office and one in the Far East. And my real name happens to be James Alexander Bishop. I don’t use it very often, but I happened to use it when I met you. And yes, I’ll give you that one for free, since I’ve already told you that one many times. You just chose not to believe me. That’s three.”
She thought for a long time. She needed to shape the questions in just the right way as to elicit the most information—Bishop would give her as little as he could get away with. Bishop. James Bishop. She believed him—in her own mind no other name fit him.
“What exactly do you do for this Committee?” The “exactly” ought to force him to tell her enough to get a sense of whether he was a good guy or a bad guy.
“You don’t want to know,” he said grimly.
She wasn’t letting him get away with that. “I asked, didn’t I? Question number four. What do you do for the Committee?”
“Kill people.” His voice was hard, but she was prepared. He wanted to shock her, frighten her, and even if he did, just a little, she wasn’t going to let him see it.
“That’s not a complete answer,” she said. “If all you did was kill people, then I would have been dead five years ago, and you wouldn’t be wandering around Texas in a Winnebago.”
“How do you know I’m not headed toward a target?”
“You may be, but it’s an awfully elaborate cover. What else do you do, and this is still question four.”
“I keep the world safe for democracy,” he said mockingly.
“England isn’t a democracy, it’s a constitutional monarchy.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. The monarchy has absolutely no power—it’s a social position and nothing more. It’s a democracy.”
“Well, tell me what you do to preserve democracy, then. Still question four,” she reminded him, not trusting him for a moment.
He rolled his eyes, but she wasn’t going to be intimidated. He started this—she’d play it to the end.
“I do anything they ask of me. I go undercover and pretend to be any number of things. Mostly I watch people, which can get fucking boring after a while. Bad guys aren’t that interesting—you’d think they would be, but they aren’t. Sometimes I kidnap troublesome young women and have sex with them in a Winnebago.”
He was trying to intimidate her, but he’d given her one very useful piece of information. “Or a hotel in Venice,” she countered smoothly.
He glanced over at her deliberately, heat in his eyes, darkening them. “I’m not sure which I prefer.”
To be truthful, neither was she, but she wasn’t about to tell him that. She’d be an idiot not to prefer the suite at the Danieli, but right now her body still remembered the fast, hard passion of the night before, and it still tingled with need.
But he’d said bad guy. Which meant, whether he would admit it or not, that he considered himself one of the good guys. Whatever this Committee was, they thought they were on the side of the angels.
But didn’t most villains think they were the heroes? People had a tendency to justify their worst behavior. Everyone was a hero in his own life, the star of his own movie.
So this so-called Committee thought they were good guys; and if they had an ingenuous mission statement like “Making the world safe for democracy,” it meant they were an antiterrorist group, even if they sometimes behaved like them. She only had one question left, and she didn’t want to waste it; while there were so many things she wanted to know, it really boiled down to one thing.
“Why me?”
He drained his beer, then reached over and took the bottle between her legs, the one she’d been ignoring. Maybe it was accidental that it pressed against her sensitive parts for a moment, another stimulation.
Who was she kidding? Nothing he did was accidental—he was the most deliberate man she had ever met.
“You want to clarify that? Considering it’s your last question, you ought to make sure you get what you want.”
Why did that sound sexual? Then again, to her battered mind almost everything he said sounded sexual. She took a deep breath. “Here’s what I know so far. I accidentally witnessed a murder you committed, one I didn’t realize I’d seen. Instead of automatically killing me, you took me back to the hotel and . . .”
“Fucked the shit out of you,” he supplied affably.