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“You know the truth.” Indy locked her gaze onto his, holding it for almost a full minute before she blinked and glanced down at the floor.
Ice exhaled. He saw the effort it had taken Indy to hold his gaze that long, to hold her own poker face. She wouldn’t be able to play this game for too long. She’d crack like an egg once Ice got his head right and put the pressure back on.
Except he needed to watch himself when it came to getting physical.
There was something dangerous building up in him, and Ice knew damn well that the only difference between a good man and a bad man was one fucking choice, one decision made in a situation like this, one moment of weakness where a man gives in to the darkness in his heart, unleashes the beast in his soul.
Like they say, with power comes responsibility.
And Ice had absolute power over this woman right now.
So he needed to damn well watch himself.
Make sure that when this was over, he could still look himself in the mirror and pretend he was a good man.
“You’re a good man,” she said like she could read his mind, turning her brown-eyed gaze back towards his stone-cold face that was so tight his damn jaw hurt. “You’re just doing your job. Following orders. But you’ve been given bad intel, Mister . . . what is your name, by the way?”
Ice swallowed thickly, knowing that she was following the damn CIA training manual, trying to make it seem like they were on the same side, saying things to remind him that she was a person and so was he, that this whole thing was about their relationship and nothing else, that there was nobody else in the room, just the two of them.
A man and a woman.
“Call me Sir,” said Ice evenly, the tension in his jaw matching the tension in his damn balls.
Indy blinked twice, a flash of color darkening her light brown cheeks. She touched her mussed-up hair, blinked again, then shrugged.
“All right, but only if you call me Indy,” she offered, playing her way through the CIA manual perfectly, making every concession conditional, quid pro quo, if I do what you ask then you must do what I ask.
“This isn’t a negotiation.”
“Everything is a negotiation.”
Ice snorted. “Is that what the CIA is teaching you kids at the Farm these days?”
Indy shook her head. “Learned that on my own. And don’t call me kid.” She took a breath, widened her eyes. “Sir.”
Ice almost lost his cold poker face, almost cracked a grin at the pointedly teasing way she called himSir. It felt playful, but Ice didn’t drop his guard.
After all, she was playing for her damn life here.
She was smart as hell, and Ice’s instincts seemed off around her, which meant he needed to be cautious, careful, wary, watchful.
So he watched her silently for a good three minutes. Silence always unnerved the guilty. And Ice could out-silence a monk in an interrogation room. As a Delta guy he’d gone weeks without saying a single word to another human, moving silent like a breeze across the land, keeping his breathing steady and his mind clear, retreating into himself until his own heartbeat was loud like a drum, the rhythms of his body synching up with the rhythms of nature as he stalked his target, hunted his enemy, claimed his prize.
He’d read Indy O’Donnell’s CIA file backward and forward, going through every detail. There was nothing about her birth-parents and their tragic ends. All that had come directly from Benson, from the jaws of the jackal, the tongue of the snake, the mouth of the coyote himself.
“Your birth parents would have been proud when you got accepted to the CIA,” Ice said softly, keeping his gaze fixed on her face, looking for a flinch, a flicker, a flash. “It would have destroyed them to know their overachiever daughter is a traitor.”
Indy flinched and flickered and flashed all at once, and Ice once again cursed himself inwardly for saying too much. He should have stopped after saying that crap about her parents being proud. Stopped and waited to see how she reacted, if she offered something about who she really thought of as her parents.
Hell, maybe she didn’t even know about her birth parents, about how they’d died. Sure, she’d have to know she was adopted, considering neither of the O’Donnells was of Indian descent. But maybe Benson had been lying about how “scarred” and “damaged” she was from her birth-parents’ untimely deaths. She would only know what she’d been told, and since nothing was in her CIA file, maybe Indy O’Donnell hadn’t been told anything.
Which was perhaps a way into this woman’s mind.
Create a vulnerability and then exploit it.
“You saidwould have beenproud. How do you know my birth parents are dead?” she whispered, her face peaked with surprise. “It’s not in my file. Nobody at CIA knows about that except the man who recruited me.”
Now it was Ice who flinched like he’d been shot. He stared at Indy like she was a ghost, a mirage, a trick of light, an illusion of the dark.