Overnight Male by Elizabeth Bevarly Read Free Book Online

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