Page 10 of Undercover
I really wanted to believe he’d meant it.
Also, what drug kingpin would buy an FBI agent a book about Pablo Escobar? I kept coming back to that. No one who could get a master’s in chemistry, or successfully smuggle that volume of fentanyl, for that matter, could be that dumb.
Rubbing my temples simply wasn’t cutting it.
I got up and paced the hotel room, back and forth from the window looking out on the brick wall across the alley behind the hotel to the deadbolted door. I’d fucked up. No way around it. I had to change tacks tomorrow, and I winced at the inadvertent sailing metaphor. Jesus Christ, I had boats on the brain.
Boats owned by the family of the guy I wanted to fuck, possibly needed to seduce, and definitely had to investigate.
I stopped in the middle of the room, breathing hard, my fists clenched. Professional. I was a goddamnprofessional. Six years in the FBI. Four years in the Air Force. And three years in college before that, powering through a degree in history that hadn’t done much for me besides make me employable on paper—unless you counted an encyclopedic knowledge of the royal family of Portugal.
For fuck’s sake, I had experience, and an education, and I had a closetful of black and gray suits that showed the world I was a bona-fide grown-up. And here I stood, in the middle of a nondescript room in a Burlington chain hotel, agonizing over a guy with purple and blue hair, just because his lips had, for a second, made me forget Portugal and my suits and even my job.
Pathetic. I took a deep breath. All the way in, and a slow exhale. It almost helped. Maybe I needed to hit up one of those suspicious yoga studios for more than just surveillance.
But no. That’d be a cold day in hell.
I sat down at the desk again, lining up my laptop precisely with the edge of it, and went back to Gabriel John Middleton’s background.
I had a date to plan—and whatever Gabe’s connection or lack thereof to my case, I still had a criminal organization to thwart. Best-case scenario, Gabe had nothing to do with any kind of smuggling. But his father’s company very well might. Kyle really liked Middleton Marine for the transport operation, and having looked at the evidence so far, I agreed with him. Gabe might know something, something he didn’t even realize he knew. Or I could use him and his connections to investigate.
Bottom line, I needed to play this out, and I needed to have my head in the game.
And I’d be fucked if I was going to let Gabe’s beautiful lips distract me from the goal again.
4
Gabe
Every time my phone chimed all morning, I jumped for it like I’d been electrocuted.
After the sixth time, I kept it in my hand instead of pretending I’d been casually doing something else and just happened to notice my phone sitting, oh, right there! What a surprise!
Because I hadn’t been fooling myself, anyway, and there wasn’t anyone else there to bother lying to.
But Alec didn’t text, and he didn’t call, and morning turned into early afternoon without anything more interesting than a couple of my so-called friends checking in to see if I wanted to meet up, with not-so-subtle hints about how they expected me to buy dinner and drinks.
Would Alec want me to pay? Yeah, almost certainly. He’d said he was unemployed, after all.
Then again, I didn’t have a job either. That didn’t mean anything.
His bad-boy persona had me kind of worried, though. Maybe I had the crazy hair, and the piercings, and the drunk club friends, but I also had all the street-smarts of your average rich kid who’d gone straight from a fancy prep school to a nice university, with a few stops in Martha’s Vineyard in between.
And while I tried to avoid introspection, I had the self-awareness to recognize the truth: Alec almost certainly had me way out of my depth.
I clutched my phone tight in one sweaty palm and looked around my condo, really focusing on the details. Yeah, I kept it kind of messy—at least in between my cleaning service’s weekly visits, the next of which would be in three days—with shoes scattered around near the front door, and clothes draped over chairs, and takeout containers on more of the kitchen surfaces than a grown-up really should’ve allowed.
But underneath all of that gleamed blond hardwood and polished chrome, with pristine billowing sheers over the floor-to-ceiling windows and a bottle of Scotch worth a month’s mortgage, at least if I’d had a mortgage, sitting on the sideboard.
This guy didn’t have a job, and he didn’t have any money, probably, and he might be a criminal.
He’d stalked me in a park. I’d really believed he might assault me.
And the thought of that one moment before he’d pulled away from me, that one moment when he’d kissed me back with his hard, muscled body pressing me into the wall…yeah, it had my cock standing up and saluting and my heart giving an unsteady lurch.
Seriously. I had something incredibly wrong with me.
Maybe jerking off in the shower would help, even though I’d already taken a shower.
