Page 11
Story: Mr. Nice Spy
Chan poked his head in first to see if any of Holt’s employees happened to be in the lab. I wasn’t sure what his plan was if there were—shout, Surprise! , then turn and run? Do the hokey pokey? I guessed I’d never find out, because the room was empty. Mr. Gun Show hadn’t been lying when he’d said everyone was unloading the shipment. The real question was how long we had before someone noticed we were missing in action.
Like everything else underground, the lab had stone walls and floors. But here it had all been covered with sheets of white plastic, drawn tight across in order to keep out dust and dirt. Compared to the dinginess of everything else, it made the area surprisingly bright. Then again, that could have been the additional floodlights they’d brought in, plugged into extension cords that snaked across the floor like wet spaghetti. Tables and storage boxes lined three walls, spaced out at even intervals. The fourth wall was clear of tables, but sectioned off with bars, like an actual prison cell. The bars had been blasted into the rock itself, so deep and so close together I couldn’t have put a fist in between had I tried.
“What do you think that’s for?” I asked, nodding to the bars.
Chan shrugged. “A caged tiger, for whenever Holt needs to show off how masculine and scary he is? It’s probably out helping unload the shipment as we speak.”
I had to hand it to Chan—he knew how to make me smile, even when my heart was knocking through my rib cage.
As if in response to my unspoken thoughts, Chan turned and cradled my face with his fingers. My breath sped up in response, and I resisted the urge to smooth down my hair.
I was a grown-up. I wasn’t a virgin. Yet somehow the thought of Chan’s lips touching mine sent delicious shivers all along my skin like I was in middle school and Hudson Palmer asked me to meet him behind the football bleachers.
When Chan hesitated too long, I lifted up on my toes, meeting him in the middle. My mouth met his and his arms wrapped around me, bringing me closer. He’d kissed my neck before, earlier today, in fact, but that was nothing compared to this. His actual lips on mine were a thousand times better, and that was before he parted my lower lip with his tongue and deepened the kiss.
If I fainted before we did any actual spy work, would that make our mission a failure? Because it very much so felt like a success. I was finally kissing Chan, and he was kissing me back, our lips moving in unison like they were already familiar with each other. Not strangers in the dark, we were friends coming together in an inevitable and expected way—a scientific, exothermic reaction that had been tried and tested a hundred times before, but I was only now experiencing the chemistry for myself for the first time. I could almost feel the heat from the reaction, even as Chan put a hand on my waist and gently pushed me toward the first table, which was littered with test tubes of various sizes.
But that was what reminded me of what we were really doing. Not just kissing, but spying, and spying had consequences. Suddenly I felt like fainting for an entirely different reason. As much as I wanted to pretend this was real, I could only pretend for so long before reality came crashing back. We were doing this to get information.
Chan could probably feel my clammy hands and trembling lips, marking me for the total amateur I was. I gripped his shirt to keep my hands from shaking uncontrollably, and my heartbeat pulsed loud in my ears.
Perhaps sensing my spiraling thoughts, Chan lightly dragged his teeth along my bottom lip, causing my fears to momentarily take a back seat. What he was doing was much more interesting. If I could just force myself to stay grounded.
My hip hit the edge of the table, and I opened my eyes, doing my best to focus on the task at hand rather than…well, the location of Chan’s hands.
I knew Chan was a capable spy. But I also knew he didn’t understand science the way I did. I was a fireworks designer who mixed dangerous explosives on a daily basis. I had a degree in chemical engineering and had spent my fair share of time in labs just like this. Well, okay, not just like this. But the fact remained, if anyone was going to get to the bottom of what was happening in this lab, it was likely up to me.
Keeping in mind there might be cameras, I surreptitiously inspected the items on the table and did my best to ignore the way Chan’s fingers trailed up the skin of my arm until they tangled themselves in my hair. But it was difficult to tell anything from the colored vials except the names on the bottles, so I put both my hands on Chan’s chest and—oh, did he have to have such defined pecs?—pushed until he took a step away from the table with a groan that definitely did things to me.
My hands latched on to the soft cotton of Chan’s shirt and I pulled him with me to the next table, noticing that as I did so, his shirt lifted at the bottom, exposing defined washboard abs that Chan obviously worked hard to maintain. I felt soft by comparison, all rounded curves to his hard edges. But Chan didn’t seem to mind my softness. His hands explored every inch of me as we bumped into the second table, his tongue tracing along my lower lip as he lifted me into a sitting position on the edge of it.
I was going to relive this moment in my dreams for years to come. This moment right here, when my back arched and Chan settled my hips against his so that every inch of my body was pressed against him. How was I supposed to focus on matters of national security when he did things like that? When I whimpered, and he made a sound in the back of his throat that could only be defined as possessive?
My entire body was weak and buzzing, and I put a hand out to steady myself, my fingers coming to rest on some papers. Papers . I gasped—half from the things Chan was doing, and half from the realization that I might have finally found something—as I glanced down at the documents on the table. Perhaps sensing my need to focus, Chan redirected his attention to my neck while I scanned the pages as quickly as I could.
The man in front of me was thrilling, but the threat looming over being discovered was just as hair-raising—albeit in an entirely different way. Time wasn’t on my side here. I was torn between wanting to make the moment last and wanting to get out of here as quickly as possible.
A lot of the terms on the paper weren’t familiar to me, or if they were, it had been so long since I’d worked with any of those formulations I had forgotten them a long time ago. But I memorized the names regardless and moved the top page over in a way that made it look like my hand happened to do it by accident while I scrambled for purchase on the table. Nothing there made any logical sense. Why would a known weapons dealer dabble in pharmaceuticals? There was money in it, that was for sure, but it hardly seemed like something that would interest a man like Holt. Even if he wanted to become a true drug lord, the formulas for cocaine and meth were already known. This looked like he was developing something new, and had been for at least a decade. Long before he’d been caught and put in jail, he’d had fancier labs than this one developing…whatever this was.
Oh.
Chan nibbled on my ear, and I momentarily forgot about the papers. What papers? All I could think about was Chan’s warm breath on my skin as he made his way from my ear back to my mouth. The papers could wait. Kissing couldn’t. At least, that was what I told myself as I caught his lip with mine and pulled him closer. His fingers found the exposed skin at the hem of my shirt, and heat swirled in my lower belly.
I would say this much about secret agent work—if this was a slice of their life, I could get used to it. Especially when Chan lifted his own shirt over his head only to throw it on the floor and stand before me in all his shirtless glory. The only problem was that now there was too much space between us, and I desperately wanted—no, needed—to feel every inch of skin he’d just exposed. My hands were greedy, pulling him back to me as I felt the ridges of his six-pack. I was heady with the whole experience, a woozy feeling of triumph mixing in with a giddy sense of getting away with something that was far beyond my normal capabilities.
Chan removed one of my hands and placed it back on the table, causing a sinking feeling of disappointment to settle in the pit of my stomach. Then I noticed what my hand landed on and I sighed. The papers. Chan angled the page and nuzzled my neck, turning my head toward the page in the process.
Well, I didn’t know how he expected me to focus when he did things like that. Or when his hand went to my leg and his thumb inched dangerously higher up on my inner thigh. I’d give him this much—for being pretend, Chan was very good at making me forget the very real danger of the situation we were in. Or the fact that he was doing this all for show regardless of how it was messing with my emotions. It was time I got with the program too.
I forced my breathing to resume a steady pattern, and I looked down at the papers while my other hand traitorously ran up and down Chan’s muscled back. Judging from the quick intake of breath he took before he resumed trailing kisses down my neck, he wasn’t immune to me either. A shot of vindication thrilled through my veins at the thought, but I forced myself to skim the page rather than dwell on my victory.
The entire document was an overview of the experiments Holt had been running for a decade and the various outcomes of the drug he’d been manufacturing. Chemical compositions, lab rat results, liquid versus physical pill formulations—it was all detailed on the pages of the brief I now read, almost as if Holt had requested a rundown when he’d transferred operations to this location after he’d gotten out of prison.
Okay, not almost. That was exactly what this dossier was. But judging from the complexity of the drug being manufactured, there was no way everything could possibly be done here. Holt must have a smaller scale of operations underground for him to see things firsthand, and a larger facility run by a partner or someone with access to Holt’s money. Someone the US criminal justice system didn’t know about when they put Holt behind bars. Someone who, even now, was kept far away from Holt so this drug had every chance of succeeding.
I moved another page over and gasped. More because Chan had found a sensitive spot behind my ear than because this new page had anything incriminating on it. But when I saw the generic nonchemical name of the drug Holt had been manufacturing or, rather, what he’d decided to name it, my hands finally stilled on Chan’s shoulders. Noticing the change, he pulled back.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, voice low. “Do you want me to stop?”
No. Definitely not that. I shook my head, swallowing the lump that had formed in my throat.
Though I didn’t think there were any bugs in this room, I couldn’t be sure. So instead, I let my hand casually land on the words on the page that had caused me to pause, my fingers stopping on the name of Holt’s creation.
The kill pill .
Chan closed his eyes and breathed through his nose. After a moment, he seemed to collect himself. But when he kissed me again, there was an urgency that hadn’t been there before. His lips crashed into mine, igniting a heat in me like a spark along a fuse.
Before, he’d been gentle. Now, he was insistent and firm, his fingertips pressing into my skin with just enough pressure to let me know that even spies got rattled by the things they saw. Even spies needed physical reassurances that things were going to be okay. And I was more than willing to be the one to give Chan those reassurances.
I wrapped my legs around his waist and brought his body closer to mine, the papers on the desk just another bad memory. I’d been on the last page anyway. I looked down like I realized what a mess I’d made and flipped them back to where they were when we’d gotten here.
There wasn’t much else to discover about this lab, except for this man in it. He was built in places I didn’t know you could even get muscles, and I loved the way the calluses on his palms dragged across my skin. When I combined that with the way his hands were going up the back of my shirt, I found I didn’t care about this lab anymore. I didn’t care whether there were air canisters in the corner—what kind of paranoid man keeps that many air canisters anyway?—or the fact that they really didn’t belong here. The liquid vials, the powder capsules, and strange assortment of pills in every shape and size. There wasn’t time for me to make sense of everything, but there were some things that did make sense. Like Chan’s hands. Because those definitely made lots and lots of sense.
I’d always heard that certain parts of the human body had more nerve endings than others. But right now I begged to differ. Because it seemed like my back had all of them. But no, my neck also, since that was where Chan was trailing kisses down to my collarbone. And I had to admit that the things Chan was doing were sending a lot of signals to other parts of my body that hadn’t received attention in a while, and if we were in this room for much longer, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep myself from taking things further than he’d probably been intending with this little charade. Because now that I was no longer reading the papers, I was also free to kiss Chan back, and I didn’t know it was possible for anyone’s skin to actually taste this good.
Chan made a noise in the back of his throat when my tongue grazed his earlobe, sending a thrill of satisfaction through me. I returned to that spot, not really sure what I was doing, but intent on making him repeat that sound. My fingers trailed lower down his chest, hooking into the front of his pants. How far could I take this? He’d already removed his shirt; surely one more article of clothing wouldn’t hurt.
Of course, that was when the door to the lab opened, and Holt stormed inside.