Overnight Male by Elizabeth Bevarly Read Free Book Online Page A

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.”

    She studied him morosely, a nervous knot forming in her stomach, and wondered why she hadn’t seen this coming from a hundred miles away. Man, she really had been out of the game too long. She’d forgotten the most rudimentary rule of OPUS. They didn’t trust anyone anytime anywhere anyhow anyway.

    “I’m going to have to be on a leash for a while,” she guessed.

    Faraday nodded.

    “And you’re going to be the one holding it.”

    He nodded again.

    She sighed, much more softly than before. Even though it wasn’t necessary for him to spell it out any further, he did. Probably just his little way of showing Lila who was going to be in charge.

    “I’ll be going to Cincinnati with you,” he told her. “And you’ll be reporting to me pretty much every day. If you don’t, I’ll be obliged to tell your superiors that you’ve gone missing