Dangerous Secrets by Lisa Marie Rice Read Free Book Online

he’d had on his stiff jeans, maybe he could have hidden it, but he had on very expensive lightweight pure virgin wool pants that outlined him completely.
    If someone yelled fire! he was a dead man.
    This was unheard of. His cock obeyed him at all times. When he said go , it went. When he said stop , it stopped. When he said down , it went down and stayed down.
    And Christ, he wasn’t hurting for sex. True, he hadn’t had a woman for a couple of weeks, except for one girl who’d picked him up in a bar the night after the takedown, when he was still pumped full of adrenaline. Four whiskeys and he was more than ready for the brunette who’d sidled up to him and told him exactly what she wanted. Waking up next to her had been depressing, though, particularly since he couldn’t remember her name.
    All the sex he’d had in the past year had been depressing, come to think of it.
    Sex with Consuelo had been creepier’n hell and with what’s-her-name had been completely unsatisfactory, like being given wax food when you’re hungry.
    Sex with Consuelo had felt like one of those sexual perversions in psychiatric manuals, like fucking dead people or something. It took a lot to put Nick off sex, but Consuelo had done it. The memory of sex with her made him nauseous.
    The thought of sex with Charity Prewitt, now that was something else entirely. Another activity altogether.
    Everything about Charity was delightful—her skin, her voice, her manner, her smell. Feminine and elegant. Totally enticing.
    No wonder his dick was standing to attention, like a divining rod that had finally found a cool, fresh spring after panning over mud flats for a year.
    “You’re staring,” Charity said dryly. He met those amazing eyes—like looking directly into a pale summer sky at noon.
    “Yes, I am,” he confessed. “But then that’s what men do—stare at pretty women. It’s what makes us different from, say, trees.”
    She smiled. Charity didn’t seem to have the coy gene most beautiful women were born with. She didn’t simper, she didn’t flutter her eyelashes—though they were so long she could probably blow candles out at twenty paces just by batting her eyes—she didn’t breathe deeply to showcase her breasts. Nick had been on the receiving end of every single one of those ploys and could write the script.
    Charity simply kept on eating serenely.
    Nick had to get his head out of his ass and start pumping—no, don’t think of that word! —for intel. There was a reason he was here, and it wasn’t to stare into Charity Prewitt’s beautiful eyes and fantasize about being inside her. And he sure as hell wasn’t here to eat Emilio’s delicious fagottini, though that was a lucky fringe benefit, too.
    By all rights, Nick should be with his partners in a freezing cold surveillance van, washing his socks and briefs out in a bucket of cold water, pissing in a jar, shitting in the woods, just like the bears. The reason he wasn’t was because he was acknowledged as being good with the ladies.
    And, of course, because he was a really, really good liar.
    Tough job, but someone’s got to do it.
    However, having all the blood rush down from his head straight into his blue steeler was not good news. He needed that blood above his neck so he could pry information out of her. Hard to do that with a hard-on that hurt.
    Think Worontzoff , he told himself. Think what a scumbag the man is.
    Vassily Worontzoff. Man of letters, novelist, the last of the Russian intellectuals sent to the Gulag. The Soviet Union was dying, but like a scorpion that still has a sting in its dying tail, it lashed, sweeping Worontzoff away.
    It wasn’t supposed to be like that. The air had been full of perestroika and glasnost. Newspapers blossomed, the Berlin Wall came down. Intellectuals were the flavor of the month.
    But something went wrong somewhere and Worontzoff and his lover Katya were sent to the place humanity forgot—Kolyma. The most notorious of