Midnight Fire

  When was the last time he kissed a woman? The memory was lost. When was the last time he’d kissed soft lips, felt another’s breath against his face, could lose himself in a woman? How could he have forgotten the magic of a woman, the soft scented fragrance of a woman’s skin?

  And this wasn’t just any woman. This was Summer. Summer who’d been so sweet all those years ago. Summer, whose articles he read faithfully so he felt like he knew how her mind worked, felt like he’d walked around inside her head.

  And Summer, with the glossy auburn hair and the pale gray eyes and the slim curvy figure who made men’s heads turn. Summer, whose mouth tasted like heaven, like some impossible heaven made just for him, after so many years spent in hell.

  Jack lived his life in a state of Defcon IV which had been bumped up to Defcon II these past six months. He was ready for an attack on his life 24/7, all his senses open to the outside world and its dangers. Danger could come from any corner and he’d lived the last six months waking up each morning accepting that it might be his last day on earth. Walking around, he’d felt a constant prickle up and down his spine, all senses projected outward.

  Yet in here, surrounded by whips and things designed to hurt and degrade, right here he could feel his senses spiral inward until the only thing in the world was his mouth on hers.

  And all the sexual desire he’d repressed in these past six months—sex being the very last thing on his mind, too dangerous to even contemplate—came rushing back in one hot liquid flow, right here, in a den of pain of all places. Well, he was feeling pain, that was for sure. His dick was about to explode out of its skin. Splat—Jack-dick everywhere.

  He’d been in hiding so long, trying to be invisible, completely on his own, out on the farthest tip of the branch, that he’d forgotten he was a man. Forgotten about other people, about women. But he remembered now. God yes, he remembered.

  They were standing now, pressed against each other, Summer’s soft, small hands clutching his shoulders as if she needed help staying upright. Fuck yeah. He needed some help, too. He moved slightly so that Summer’s back was to the table and he was pressing against her, first because it felt so good to have his dick pressing tightly against her belly, easing just a little of the pain and second, because his knees felt weak, like they couldn’t support his weight. But leaning against Summer, dick against her belly, chest against her soft breasts, mouth to her mouth—yeah. He could do that.

  The kiss grew harder and she was into it. He slanted his mouth over hers again and didn’t have to open her mouth with his. No, she was right there, tongue stroking his. The first time she did that he felt his dick swell. Even though every drop of blood in his body was now in his dick, even though he was sure he couldn’t get any harder, he did.

  Jack settled more heavily against her, feeling all that warmth and softness after so long in the cold, hard world. He drew in a deep breath, breathing her in too, and oh, God, the sheer delight.

  Delight warred with pure lust. They were two entirely different things. Delight was lazy, willing to cling to the moment for hours, kissing on the lawn on a sun-dappled afternoon. Losing yourself in the kiss, no time element at all, no driving toward any goal, just a long meandering path amid the flowers.

  Lust no. That was entirely different. Lust was harder-edged, more driven. More single-minded. Lust knew exactly where it wanted to go. His lust did, anyway. It wanted to dive straight into Summer, slide into her, feel her all around him. As it was, he could feel his heartbeat in his dick, pumping hard, faster than normal.

  Lust was winning out. Jack held the back of Summer’s head still, latex or not, and dove deeper into her mouth, licking her, pulling back for an instant to nip at her lips with his teeth, then back in.

  His other hand went around her back, slid down her coat to cup her ass, press her hard against him. Through the layers of their clothes, she felt him. There was a tiny little jerk when she felt how hard he was. Maybe she could feel the heat, too, through all those clothes, because he could feel it. His dick was on fire, about to spontaneously combust.

  He hitched her up, ready to lay her across the display table of butt plugs—and Christ, that idea excited him even more, even if he didn’t even like the idea of them—when she stiffened and pulled her face away.

  Jack’s eyes opened and he saw her, mouth wet and swollen from his kisses, cheeks a deep rose that was the most gorgeous color he’d ever seen, her normally smooth hair a wild, dark red tangle around her face.

  If there was one thing Jack knew—besides recruiting and running agents and infiltrating bad places—it was female arousal and he was looking right at it. Dilated pupils, vein hammering in her throat, mouth slack to pull in oxygen. She was ready and by God, so was he.

  He bent his head to kiss her again and she jerked away and when he looked at her again, it was all over.

  She’d closed up completely, face as expressionless as a porcelain doll’s. He looked down at her and read absolutely nothing there.

  She was gone. That beautiful woman kissing him like there was no tomorrow—she’d left the building and left a beautiful mannequin in her stead.

  Summer pushed against his chest lightly, but no matter how light the touch the message was clear—get off me.

  Jack stepped back, but it was hard. Was it all those months—years really—of abstinence? Because he didn’t remember it being this hard. Not many women had said no to him, but there’d been a few. He’d never had a problem with stepping back but right now his body wasn’t obeying.

  His knees were weak, his hands didn’t want to leave her, above all his dick didn’t want to be left out in the cold like this, all revved up with nowhere to go. If it couldn’t be inside her, at least it could be pressed against her.

  But Summer was slipping out sideways and was no longer between him and the table. She was standing a foot away from him, smoothing out her hair, expression cool.

  “God.” She gave a harsh laugh but laughter didn’t reach her eyes. “Nothing has changed, has it? Still the same old Jack.”

  Everything has changed, he wanted to answer. And I’m not the same old Jack. I’m someone else entirely.

  But what good would it do to protest? From Summer’s point of view, she’d last seen him when he’d left her for no good reason and now, after fifteen years, he was trying to seduce her again.

  No use explaining that the Jack who’d left her was a boy long dead. And the Jack who desired her was another man, who was turned on by the woman she’d become. He wasn’t any longer the young man who could be turned on by any woman who didn’t make dogs whine in the streets and had the right plumbing.

  So he shut up and tried to beat down his hard-on.

  He ran a shaking hand down his face, hoping she didn’t notice the trembling. Luckily, she was looking elsewhere, so she wouldn’t have to look at him.

  If she thought he’d apologize she was wrong.

  “Let’s shoot the place.”

  Her head turned sharply to him, hair belling around her face. “Let’s what?”

  “Shoot.” Jack pulled his cell out. “Take photographs. And videos of the place.”

  She studied his face for a moment and he hoped that fifteen years in the Clandestine Service were enough to hide everything he was feeling at the moment. Massive loneliness. A desperate yearning to connect with this woman. And a lust that was barely in his control.

  Training won out because she didn’t say anything, just pulled her own cell out and studied the room. “I’ll take these two walls.” She pointed to the north and west walls. “And you take the other two. Then we’ll shoot the rest of the apartment.”

  Jack nodded and swallowed a lot of things he wanted to say.

  It went fast. The place had no hidden compartments. Why should it? The whole damned room was hidden from view, from outside eyes. Jack
filmed, not just shot. On a grid, as if the entire wall were a crime scene.

  Blake had been really thorough—he had every toy on earth and some Jack had never heard of. Better Homes & Dungeons.

  It was interesting in a freakish sort of way, but there was nothing there from an intel point of view.

  Jack and Summer finished more or less at the same time and exited Blake’s House of Pain into the bedroom. Jack gently pushed the bookcase until he heard the click of the lock.

  “Now.” He looked at Summer who looked back, perfectly calm, as if he were the postman or her banker. Nothing to do with her.

  For an instant, Jack rebelled. There had been an undeniable connection when they’d kissed. He’d kissed enough lady frogs to understand that. And goddamn it, Summer had felt it, too. Pretending indifference wasn’t going to work, he’d break down that wall, whatever it took. Now was not the right time, but the right time was coming up real soon.

  He walked into the living room and Summer followed. “He’ll have a safe somewhere. This was his hideaway and he’d want cash and other stuff. I’m hoping he’d also keep some intel in the safe. Where do you think he’d keep it?”

  Summer frowned, thinking. She turned and walked slowly around the perimeter of the apartment, observing carefully. Jack let her do it. Something was going to trigger a memory or she’d find something out of place. Summer was smart. Just let her do her job.

  “There’s another bedroom.” She disappeared into the second bedroom as Jack turned slowly in a circle. He thought he knew Blake. He’d grown up with him. All the Delvaux kids had called him “uncle.”

  And he’d had the Delvaux family massacred.

  Rage rose up, uncontrollable, a hot heavy mass like magma from the earth, too hot to handle. He’d been mourning his family for six months but only recently his suspicions that Blake had been responsible were confirmed. And Blake had had Hugh killed, too. Though the fucker was dead, the Delvauxes and Hugh cried out for justice. One day they’d have it. One day, the truth would—

  “Jack.” Summer called from the bedroom. “Come here.”

  He shot into the bedroom, alarmed, looked around. No obvious threats. No obvious leads, either.

  “What do you see?” Summer asked.

  “What do I see?” Jack focused. “We already know about the Den of Pain. So okay, super big bed because clearly Hector liked playing around. Two bedside tables with nothing on them but brass lamps. Big chest of drawers—I’m assuming you checked inside?”

  Summer nodded.

  “Okay. So big chest of drawers with nothing interesting inside. Walk in closet.” Jack opened the closet door and blinked at the Fifty Shades of Grey style array of suits running the gamut from dark gray to light gray, at least thirty identical white shirts, several sports jackets and colored sports shirts. To the left were open shelves with sweaters arranged by color—Jesus! Who did that?—and to the right a shoe shelf with maybe fifty pairs of shoes.

  Jack spent a few minutes tapping the walls, systematically and thoroughly, and got sore knuckles for his pains.

  He walked out, dusting his hands. “Nothing in the closet.”

  “I didn’t find anything, either.”

  Jack bit back the obvious response. Then why the fuck did you make me knock on those fucking walls?

  “What else do you see?” Summer asked.

  Was this a trick question?

  “Okay. No bookshelves in this room. Presumably he didn’t need to impress his bed partners with his erudition. Turkish carpet. Looks antique. Expensive.”

  “And on the walls?”

  Jack glanced around. “Couple of lithographs. Probably brought in by the decorator. Glory wall. Hector with three presidents. Hector and the president of Harvard. Hector with the Director of the FBI and the CIA. Hector with two Nobel Prize winners.”

  “And?”

  “And a big oil painting. A portrait.”

  “A portrait of—”

  “Of Aunt Vanessa.” Light was beginning to dawn as Summer looked at him steadily.

  “Aunt Vanessa whom he—”

  “Hated.” Jack sprang to the wall and lifted the big heavily-framed oil portrait from the wall. Tried to, anyway. It wasn’t moving.

  “Try running your hand along the bottom of the frame.”

  Jack did and felt something. A tiny lever. He shifted it from left to right and felt a mechanism disengage. A pull and the frame came away from the wall, on hidden hinges, opening right to left.

  And there it was—a keypad.

  “There we have it,” Summer said. “Keypads don’t scare us. You have your magic doodad, right?”

  Jack didn’t answer. He brought his backpack into the bedroom, set it on the floor, and took out some equipment. “I’ve got two things here. Let’s try this one first. Hit the lights, will you?”

  Summer dimmed the ceiling light to dark and Jack lifted his UV light flashlight and shone it on the keypad. So, it was going to be the easy way.

  “Wow.” Summer peered closer. “Even I can tell that the code is some combination of 2, 4, 6 and 7.”

  “Most likely 4627,” Jack said absently, punching the numbers in. Blake definitely did not take his security seriously in this flat. It was clearly not set up for him by pros. He obviously thought the place would never be searched. “DNA samples show up in different concentrations. Usually when keying in a code, you hit the first number hardest and the last number lightly.”

  With a click, the safe door opened.

  “If that hadn’t worked, I have the electronic keypad cracker we used to get in the side door. Can crack most anything in under four seconds.”

  “Is that what you used on my apartment?”

  Jack felt inside the safe and started hauling things out. “Bingo.”

  “I need better security.”

  “Told you.”

  “So, what do we have here?”

  “First of all, money.” Jack pulled out bricks of $100 bills and started filling his backpack. He peered into the safe and made a rough calculation. “I figure there’s upward of one hundred thousand dollars in cash here.”

  “Whoa.” Summer watched him then placed her hand over his. “What are you doing?”

  Jack straightened. “First, Hector had no heirs and his ex-wives are total bitches who are doing just fine. Second, Hector was party to wiping my family and over seven hundred souls out and this money is going to help find his backers and maybe stop another attack. Why? Do you want it?”

  Summer’s gray eyes went wide and she put her hands behind her back. “God no! That’s tainted money.”

  “Yeah. It’s tainted and it’s going to be put to good use.” He finished stacking the bricks and unzipped the sides of the backpack, making it more capacious. “And even better than the money, we have some flash drives. Three, to be exact. Felicity is going to have a field day. And, last—” Jack pulled out four US passports, two French and British passports in EU burgundy, an Australian passport with a silver crown, a New Zealand passport with a silver royal coat of arms, New Zealand in Maori and a leafy plant along the right hand side. A light blue Republic of the Fiji Islands passport and most interesting of all, a burgundy Chinese passport.

  Jack showed it to Summer, opened it to the passport photo. A definitely recognizable Hector Blake.

  “Treason,” Summer breathed. “Was he going to run to China? What could he possibly want with a fake Chinese passport?”

  “Maybe absconding to China. Or anywhere in the Commonwealth. Or the Fiji Islands. He has—had—over a billion dollars squirrelled away.”

  Summer huffed out a breath. Her face was pale, set in angry lines. Anger came off her in waves. She was stiff with it.

  Yeah. Hector Blake had been a terrorist and a traitor. If it was the
last thing Jack did, he was going to unearth and expose everything Blake had done.

  “I want him,” Summer said crisply. “I want this story. I want to take down everyone who has ever worked with Hector, I want to unmask what he’s done, how he has betrayed his country. I want to expose every step of this. With details. I’m going to kick ass and name names.”

  Jack’s neck hairs rose. He knew Summer was smart and dedicated. She’d attended Harvard on full scholarships even though her education had been sketchy because of her hippie parents dragging her around the world. Area 8 was one of the best known political blogs around and she’d built it from the ground up. So. Smart, dedicated and tenacious. If she said she wanted to expose all this shit to the public, she was deathly serious, and he had no doubt she would do just that. She was like a dog with a bone.

  The other thing he knew was that the people involved in this conspiracy were vicious and ruthless. They had not stopped at assassinating his father, the next President of the United States, together with over seven hundred people, they hadn’t stopped at murdering the head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. They sure wouldn’t stop at killing Summer.

  Whatever was going on was very big, run by powerful, ruthless people. The idea of Summer in their crosshairs made fear skitter along his skin, made his heart give a huge painful thump in his chest, made him break out in a sweat.

  Because they would swat her away like a fly, without thought or remorse. Bullets were cheap and triggermen who would shoot a woman were cheap, too. The bullet would come flying to her head from a sniper’s nest and by the time the medics came, the sniper would be far away, the fatal weapon disassembled and placed neatly into its foam packing. The gun and the bullet would be clean of any markers and any DNA. Summer would be a broken doll on the sidewalk, another tragic victim of senseless violence in a year that had seen so many.