Midnight Special Coming on Strong - By Tawny Weber Page 0,21

she wasn’t sure she could handle going back in there with him.

Maybe she should get off in Chicago, she thought as the waiter led them across the crowded dining car to a small table by the window.

She now had the name of the FBI agent in charge of the case, which was more than the FBI public relations liaison had offered before. She had enough information on the explosion to put together a decent story and, since Burns hadn’t been implicated yet, if she got the story in by midnight, it might run before the trial next week. But the story would be speculation that he blew up his own building, without any facts to back it up. It’d be a decent story.

Maybe. If she found some way to build it into more than conjecture and supposition.

But it wasn’t enough to be her breakout story.

It wouldn’t launch her up the reporting ladder of success.

With a smile of thanks for the waiter holding the leather dining chair out for her, Marni settled down across from Hunter.

She bit her lip, pretending to read the menu while her brain swirled in a million directions at once.

She couldn’t get off the train. She needed a big story, not a fair-to-middling one. Hunter was her hook. Her big break. Her provider of the sexiest, most delicious sleeping orgasm she’d ever had in her life.

“What can I get you?”

“Another org...” Horrified, Marni pressed her lips together, not daring to look at Hunter. She could feel his gaze on her, though. Like a laser peering into her soul, searching out secrets and sexual fantasies. “An organic fruit tray, if you have it,” she corrected with a bright smile and a flutter of her lashes. They worked as distraction enough for the waiter, who blushed and wrote so hard on his pad that he broke the tip of his pencil.

“Sorry. Be right back,” he muttered, hurrying away. But not without giving Marni one last effusive look.

“Do you do that often?”

Steeling herself, Marni shifted her smile to curiously innocent before she met Hunter’s gaze.

“Do what?”

“The cute thing. Does it work all the time, or is it a fifty-fifty thing?”

More like seventy-thirty. And only with men. She’d never been called on it before, though. Which meant he was likely in that elusive, unreachable thirty percent who wouldn’t see her as just a pretty face. He might expect something.

Like the truth. Her truth.

Something no man had ever looked past her face and figure to wonder about.

“Can I bring you anything else?” the waiter asked as he set the plate of fruit in front of Marni.

It took all her will to pull her gaze from Hunter’s intense stare. Marni blinked at the waiter a couple of times, trying to focus her thoughts. Then, not bothering to look at the menu again, she handed it to him and ordered, “Coffee, two scrambled eggs, whole wheat toast and a side of potatoes.”

“Right away.” He offered an excited smile before turning away.

“Excuse me,” she called before he could leave.

“Yes?”

Her lips twitched at his eager reply, and then she tilted her head toward Hunter. “My friend is hungry, too.”

“You’re something else,” Hunter said after the blushing waiter had taken his order and hurried away. “Those eyelashes should be registered as lethal weapons.”

Marni batted her lethal weapons.

“But they won’t work on me.”

She stopped batting.

What would work on him? What was it going to take for him to relax enough for her to sneak a story out of the guy?

Because she’d do it, whatever it was.

Except strip naked and beg him to take her.

Well, maybe whatever it took except that.

5

MARNI MENTALLY RECITED all of the reasons it was important to keep her clothes on as she considered the sexy FBI agent across from her while their waiter poured coffee.

There had to be a better—aka less dangerous to her mental and emotional well-being—way to get this story.

She’d spent a little time researching while he’d tried to stare her out of their cabin earlier. With a document opened, she used typing away at her aunt’s life story as she knew it as her cover. It’d been a few years since she’d worked on a biography type profile, and she’d forgotten how much she loved it. Curiosity drove all of her writing, but there was an extra spark to a profile, the excitement of digging into the who and why of a person’s life that she found fascinating.

She’d been so lost in the joy of writing, she’d had to force herself,