Elizabeth Bevarly - Overnight Male

At the time, she honestly hadn’t thought much about it. Mostly because it hadn’t been any hardship to have sex with Adrian Padgett. He was a gorgeous, sexy guy, and as such, Lila had been powerfully attracted to him on a physical level. At that time, too, she’d been going through some things in her personal life that had allowed her to disengage herself from her feelings, even more so than usual. He’d turned her on, and he’d wanted her. She’d taken advantage of both facts. Unfortunately, he’d figured out she was part of the OPUS machine before she could make use of her new position in his life.

“And were you seduced?” Faraday asked her point-blank.

“No,” she replied honestly. “When I had sex with Sorcerer, I was an active and willing participant.”

His mouth flattened into a tight line at that, and a muscle twitched in his jaw. “So you really did sleep with him?”

“I won’t apologize for what I did that night,” she told him. “It wasn’t exactly protocol, but neither was it against the rules. Plenty of agents before me—male and female—have used sex to garner information from someone they were investigating.”

“And did you?” Joel asked. “Garner information from Sorcerer?”

“Some. I could have gotten more if I’d had an opportunity to extend our…liaison. As it was, he figured out who I worked for before I had the chance.”

“And was the desire for information the only reason you slept with him?” Joel asked.

Honesty, she reminded herself. She had to be honest. So she told him, “No. It was the desire for something else. And I found Adrian Padgett to be genuinely attractive.”

“Even knowing what he is?”

“I didn’t think about what he is,” she said. “I thought about how he made me feel. How he made my body feel,” she corrected herself. Since that was the only place she’d felt anything while she was with him.

“And would you have slept with him knowing what he is if you hadn’t needed information?” Joel asked.

Why he was belaboring this she couldn’t begin to imagine. It wasn’t as if he had a stake in it. Again, being honest, she replied, “No. Not knowing he was Sorcerer. Had he just been some guy I met, yeah. I might have. But I don’t sleep with the enemy just because the enemy turns me on. The enemy needs to have something else I want more than physical gratification.”

“Information.”

She nodded. “Information.”

Her encounter with Adrian Padgett had come at a time when Lila wasn’t much concerned with moral or ethical repercussions. Hell, that was one of the reasons OPUS had recruited her in the first place. She was the perfect candidate for the job they wanted her to do. Estranged from what little family she had—not even knowing about half of it when they recruited her—and coming from a background that had prevented her from forming emotional attachments to other people, she was a vessel waiting to be filled by OPUS policy and procedure. The fact that she wasn’t bad to look at and was used to being kicked around hadn’t hurt, either. Nor did the fact that she was accustomed to hard work. Add it all up, and OPUS found in Lila Moreau the quintessential femme fatale. And boy, did they exploit it. And her. Why shouldn’t she exploit herself, too? At least she was the one in control then.

“I won’t apologize for what I did,” she said again. “Because circumstances being what they were at the time, I wasn’t out of line to do it. And it did lull Sorcerer into a false security that allowed us to extend the life of the investigation in Indianapolis long enough that we almost caught him.”

“But you didn’t catch him,” Joel reminded her.

“No,” she agreed. “Unfortunately, we didn’t.” She met his gaze levelly. “But this time, I promise you, I’m taking that son of a bitch down. ” She hesitated for a moment, then added, “And I’m going to do it in less than two weeks.”

Faraday arched his dark eyebrows again. “We don’t even know exactly where he is. How can you set a timetable at this point?”

She grinned, mostly because she couldn’t help herself. Lila always grinned when she thought of what would be happening in two weeks. “’Cause I have someplace I need to be in two weeks, that’s why.”

Now he narrowed his eyes at her. “I haven’t heard anything about another assignment for you. In fact, they made clear to me that this is the only thing on your agenda right now and to take all the time we needed.”

Lila studied her manicure. “Yeah, well, just shows how much they know.”

Faraday straightened and hooked his hands on his hips. “Where do you have to be in two weeks?” he demanded.

She sat back on her haunches and mimicked his challenging posture, settling her hands on her hips, too. “That’s none of your damned business.”

Up went the eyebrows again. “Excuse me?”

Enunciating more carefully, she repeated, “It’s. None. Of. Your. Damned. Business.”

His gaze never once leaving hers, he glared at her harder, shifted his weight to one foot, crossed his arms over his chest, expelled a soft sound and said quietly, “Don’t push me, Lila.”

It spoke volumes about his effect on her that she actually found herself relenting. Then again, it wasn’t as if her whereabouts in two weeks would be top secret. “Fine,” she muttered, relaxing her stance. “If you must know, I have a wedding to go to in two weeks.”

His mouth dropped open a fraction, and he eyed her blandly. “A wedding.”

She nodded. “Yeah, a wedding. I’m gonna be the best man. So I need to wrap this thing up before then. I need to bring down the son of a bitch one way or another before the Saturday after next.”

Faraday didn’t reply right away, only looked at Lila in a way she found a little disconcerting. It kind of made her feel the way a bug must feel when it was pinned under a microscope, while some guy in a white lab coat loomed over it holding a big ol’ pair of tweezers in one hand and a specimen slide in the other.

Finally he said, “We.”

Confused, Lila asked, “What?”

“We,” he said again. “ We are going to bring the son of a bitch down.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “What are you talking about?”

“You and I,” he clarified. “We’ll be bringing in Sorcerer together.”

She shook her head. Oh, she didn’t think so. Aloud, she told him, “No, we won’t. I’ll be going to Cincinnati, and you’ll be staying here with all your gizmos and files. The wonders of technology and all that. Even hundreds of miles away, I can report in daily. That’s the way it always works. Me in the field sending intelligence where I find it, my partner manning home base collecting and dissecting that information. Yeah, we’re usually no more than a few miles apart at most, but it shouldn’t be a problem, you staying here in D.C.”

Now Faraday smiled in a way that Lila found really disconcerting. Like maybe the guy in the lab coat just lit the flame on a Bunsen burner. He pointed behind himself at the overflowing desk, where, at the bottom of a pile of papers, sat a laptop, now folded closed. “The wonders of technology,” he echoed. “As long as I have a wireless connection, I can be hundreds of miles away from all my gizmos and files and still have everything I need at my fingertips. Meaning I’ll never have to be more than a few miles at most away from my partner.”

Oh, no, Lila thought. No, no, no, no, no. He was not saying what he seemed to be saying.

He continued, “See, Lila, you may officially be back to tabula rasa with the big guys, but they’re not quite ready to cut you loose to your own devices again.”