Hide and Seek - Lara Adrian Page 0,82
I want to know. Don’t you get it? This is not a game. Lives are at stake here.” He moved in, bringing his face to hover only inches from hers. “Were you the one to set up the meet?”
She shook her head, trembling now. “I was told to record whoever was showing up here.” Tears brimmed at her eyes. “I didn’t know it was going to be you.”
He breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, Michelle was talking. Softening his voice, he asked, “The person you work for, who is he with? CIA? NSA?”
She gave a helpless shrug. “I don’t know.”
Nick growled. “Michelle.”
“I swear I don’t know.” She sucked in a breath. “I don’t know who he is. He contacts me and tells me what to do. I have no choice.”
He studied her face for a moment, wheels clicking into place now. “His offer to work for him wasn’t really an offer, was it?”
Silently, she shook her head and dropped her lids.
“Is that why you’re getting a fake passport made?”
Her head shot up and she pinned him with her eyes. “How do you know that?”
“The flash drive on your key ring. You had image files and information on it that pointed to it.”
She braced her hands at her hips, suddenly furious. “You took my memory stick? That’s private property. You had no right!”
He shrugged. Private property rights weren’t really his concern right now. He had bigger fish to fry. “Should have encrypted it.”
“There’s no need to encrypt it! It never leaves my sight.”
He pasted a grin on his face. “It did when you took a shower.”
“You, you…” Her hands came up as if she wanted to hit him, but he stopped her by pressing the gun harder against her neck.
Her eyes darted to it. “Don’t you think that’s a little overkill right now? You’ve assured yourself already that I’m not armed. Or do you use that gun as an extension of your dick?”
He chuckled involuntarily. He couldn’t really blame her for being angry; neither could he take that kind of insult lying down. “My dick needs no extension, as you well know.”
She huffed indignantly.
But she’d made her point, and knowing what he knew of her so far, Michelle posed no physical threat to him. He put the safety back on the gun and holstered it, but didn’t step back, keeping her trapped between his body and the tree trunk.
“Now that we’ve established the size of my dick, let’s continue. What else did your mysterious handler want you to do?”
“Just record the people who were going to meet here and then text him the file.”
“I don’t mean tonight. I mean in general. You were stalking me online, trying to prevent me from hacking into a server.”
Her mouth gaped open for a second, before she spoke. “So that was you.”
“Yeah, that was me. You’re pretty good, but you made a mistake.”
“How?”
“Doesn’t matter. I traced your IP address to the coffee shop.”
She nodded. “So it wasn’t a coincidence then. Too good to be true. You played me all this time. Got into my pants just so you could figure me out, that it?” She tossed him an angry glare.
“And trust me, I enjoyed it, and so did you.”
“Jerk! I would have never slept with you had I known—”
He pressed his body to hers, grinding his hips into her pelvis, snatching her wrists with both his hands, and pinning her against the tree.
“You don’t know anything, Michelle. Or do you know how I fought with my conscience whether to seduce you or not? Whether to take you to bed or not? How I agonized over it, knowing that it was wrong to touch you when I knew I was doing it to get information from you?”
He lowered his lids, only looking at her parted lips now.
“While all this time, I wanted you, wanted to be with you and make love to you as if we were normal people who are attracted to each other. Do you know that I wished that my suspicions were wrong? That you weren’t the hacker they’d sent to catch me?”
He released her wrists and shoved a hand through his hair, realizing something for the first time.
“Damn it, I slept with you because I wanted you. I could have gotten the information I needed by other means, too. By breaking into your place, or by mugging you. I didn’t need to get this close. But I wanted to.”
Just like he wanted her now beyond all reason.
Unable to stop himself, he sank