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“I’m not sure of anything right now,” Indy confessed as she tried to move but couldn’t. “Just that we’re probably emptying out all the Mumbai reservoirs by letting three showerheads blast away to glory while you interrogate and torture me.”
Ice thought a moment, then grunted. “Don’t move.” He pressed his palm flat against her upper back, then reached out and turned off the shower, killing all three showerheads at once.
The roar of the jets still echoed through the steam long enough for the silence to slip in behind.
And through the silence came a sickeningly unwelcome sound from outside the bathroom door.
Ice’s phone.
“Fuck,” he muttered, closing his eyes tight and shaking his head. He considered ignoring the call. Maybe it was Jack calling back to give him more shit. He waited for three long rings, then felt Indy turn her head towards him, her shoulders slumping in a sigh that Ice himself felt go through his tensed-up body. “If that’s Jack, I swear I will break his fucking neck.”
The rings kept coming, and Ice knew he had to take the call. Jack was on his way to Baltimore with Keller on serious Darkwater business, and so it wouldn’t be him. Which meant it was Benson calling with an update—or maybe the bastard just wanted to know why Ice wasn’t within snooping range of his phone’s camera and microphone. Either way, Ice couldn’t ignore the call.
So Ice huffed out a breath and stepped away from Indy. She sighed against the wall, then slowly turned towards him. A quick glance into his eyes, then she blinked and looked away, her cheeks darkening with color. Turning off the shower seemed to have flipped some kind of switch in her, maybe in both of them. Hell, even the steam was gone, sucked up by the powerful vents. Cool air was circulating through the wet bathroom, and Indy’s shoulders hunched forward as a shiver went through her puckered-up body.
The moment was over, the mood was dead, and Ice felt a chill go through him as he pulled open the bathroom door, stormed over to the living room, snatched up a handful of towels from the stack on the sofa. He glanced at his angrily vibrating phone, saw that it was Benson’s number, noticed that the camera was flashing like a demon’s eyeball.
Ice shook his head, held up a middle finger to the camera, which would have already transmitted a full frontal shot of Ice in all his glory. He followed up the finger-flip with a towel-toss to cover the camera, then turned to see Indy wet and shivering standing in the doorway, waiting for a towel.
“Guess it wasn’t meant to be,” she said awkwardly as Ice underhanded a rolled-up towel in her direction. She caught the towel and wrapped it around her, then flashed a little smile that hinted at disappointment.
But there was something else in that tense little smile, and as Ice watched Indy turn away and close the bathroom door, a sinking dread stabbed at his heart.
He felt it too, that other unnamable, unspeakable, unfathomable emotion lurking behind the disappointment.
A sense that perhaps they’d never get this chance again, never get this choice again, never get this moment again.
17
“It’ll take a moment to run the search, Rhett. Do you want some coffee in the meantime?”
Rhett Rodgers shook his head, then leaned back on the atrociously pink cloth-covered sofa and crossed one leg over the other knee. He carefully plucked a long blond hair off his tailored charcoal trousers, frowning as he went over what he knew needed to happen at the end of this little tryst at Blondie’s studio apartment in Georgetown.
He glanced at the back of Blondie’s head as she hunched over a black unmarked laptop. Rhett couldn’t see her face, but he knew she’d be scrunching up her nose in that almost-cute way, squinting those whip-smart blue eyes at the lines of computer code streaming across the screen, her long slender fingers flying over the keyboard like a concert pianist giving a virtuoso performance.
Rhett hadn’t been planning to use the twenty-six-year-old CIA tech analyst this way. But it was always an option, which was why he called her Blondie instead of her real name. Rhett had learned early that tying up loose ends was easier when you didn’t see the people you discarded as real humans.
They’d met two years ago at the coffee-machine in Langley’s windowless technology bunker. Rhett had been down there supervising an unsanctioned drone-strike on a Russian oligarch’s yacht off the coast of Santorini, Greece. He’d chatted her up when he was all jacked up after watching on the big screen as the attack-drone sank the hundred-foot boat with everyone on board—including a full crew and about a dozen members of the Russian’s family, women and children included.
Collateral damage, Rhett reminded himself as Blondie swiveled around on her chair, beaming proudly at him as the computer beeped behind her.
“NSA database turned up a match with the CCTV footage from the Mumbai airport. Got the guy’s passport—an alias—from the Indian immigration database. Then I ran a search for the alias against all local hotels. They’re at the Raj Palace Hotel in Mumbai. Oh, and I also got his real name from the Department of Defense database,” Blondie announced happily, smiling wide then curling a loose strand of hair around her left ear. Her blue blouse was still unbuttoned, her white bra still pushed up over her tiny breasts that got Rhett surprisingly hard even though he preferred tits that could fill his hands.
Shit, he would miss Blondie.
They had a nice thing going.
Collateral damage was a bitch sometimes.
Rhett grunted an acknowledgment, making sure he didn’t return the smile. It was important to keep a woman off-balance and insecure. That way even the slightest affection would melt her like butter, make her willing to do anything for you. He stayed silent and cold, his mind spinning ahead to how he was going to clean up after disposing of Blondie.
Blondie lost the smile, self-consciousness streaking her heavily made-up face. She’d never worn makeup until Rhett had suggested she’d look better if she covered up those acne-scars from college, where she’d been a star hacker at MIT.
“What’s next?” she said hopefully, nervous excitement making her clutch the foam armrests of her swivel chair. “Another wet-team? I can use a different subcontractor. It won’t be traced back to us.”
There is nous,you dumb bitch, Rhett thought with a shiver of contempt.He glanced past her at the computer screen, then graced her with the hint of a smile. She was excited like a puppy, thrilled that the great Rhett Rodgers had taken her into his confidence, was going to take her along as he rose to the top of the CIA dogpile.
Rhett stroked his jaw, shot a quick glance at her exposed nipples, cursed himself for leaving that bite-mark when he’d bounced her on his cock and come hard into her, his orgasm enhanced by the knowledge that it would be the last time for Blondie, that she’d die with his semen in her cunt.