You've Got Male

But how did he know all that stuff about her? she wondered as she opened her eyes again…and immediately began to drown in the frozen green depths of his eyes. Certainly the news of her arrest and conviction was a matter of public record. Hell, it’d been a media circus at the time. But that had been ten years ago. Few people talked about any of that anymore. Fewer still remembered her name. Virtually none of them knew how her life had been in prison or even to which facility she’d been sent. Certainly none knew the names of her closest friends inside, as this man did. And how did he know about Andrew? She’d told no one about him. She’d had no one to tell about him.

“Who are you?” she asked again.

He smiled that sinister smile of his. “Well, now, Peaches, if you’d looked at my ID, you wouldn’t have to ask that question.”

“Your ID looks like something that came out of a box of Cap’n Crunch,” she told him, ignoring the nickname.

“Oh, and you’d know, since you pretty much live on stuff like Cap’n Crunch.”

“Who the hell are you?” she demanded for a third time, more forcefully now. Her fear for her personal safety was quickly being usurped by her indignation at having her privacy—and her person—violated. If it turned out this guy wasn’t an actual threat to her physical well-being, she was going to bitch-slap him up one side of Park Avenue and down the other.

He eyed her thoughtfully for a moment, as if he were weighing several possible outcomes to the situation. As he did, Avery weighed an outcome he couldn’t possibly be anticipating, no matter how much he thought he knew about her. And she was reasonably certain it would be the one outcome that ultimately occurred. For now, though, she contented herself in simply lying limp beneath him, hoping it might lull him into a false sense of security.

It did.

Because he told her, “I’m going to let you up, okay? And I’m going to show you my ID again, and you’re going to look at it. And then we’re going to have a little chat and then we’re going to take a little drive someplace, where you can chat with a few more people, too.”

Oh, yeah. No worries here. Whoever this guy was, he’d driven way past a false sense of security and was now touring the state of delusion. This was going to work even better than Avery had planned.

She nodded slowly and said, “Okay.”

Still obviously wary—he wasn’t stupid, after all—the guy began to push himself off and away from her. She waited until he was seated beside her on the sofa, then carefully maneuvered herself into a sitting position, too, at the opposite end. She inhaled another deep breath and pushed both braids over her shoulders.

“Okay,” she said again. “Let me see your ID.”

He lifted his hands up in front of himself, palms out, keeping one that way while the other dipped beneath his open jacket to extract the leather case he’d held up to the peephole. Gingerly he extended it toward her, and just as gingerly Avery accepted it, opening it to study the information inside.

The badgish-looking thing on the right was a rendition of a badge with a symbol on it, if not an actual badge itself, though it was one Avery had never seen before. And since her incarceration she’d done a lot of research into the various law-enforcement fields of the American justice system. Hey, she’d had some time on her hands. And she’d figured then—just as she did now—that it was always good for one to know everything one could about one’s enemies. As a result, she was familiar with some pretty obscure tactical outfits and task forces about which other people had heard very little, if anything at all.

But this badge and its symbol were like nothing she’d ever seen. Although it had the traditional shield shape, there were few identifying marks on it. No numbers or letters at all. A border that resembled a heavy chain wound around the outer edge, surrounding what looked like a lance and a smaller shield at its center.

The left side of the case was considerably more revealing. Or it would have been had Avery believed a single word of the information recorded there. Which she didn’t. According to this man’s identification, his name was Santiago Dixon and he worked for something called the Office of Political Unity and Security, a bogus-sounding operation if ever there was one. Unless he’d just sauntered shaken-not-stirred out of an Ian Fleming novel, she wasn’t buying the name of him or his employer any more than she bought the part where it said his city of birth was Macon, Georgia.

She glanced up from his identification and smiled blandly. “And the reason I should believe this is a legitimate document is because…?”

He smiled blandly back. “Because it’s a legitimate document,” he told her. “Except for my name and birthplace, naturally. They never put any personal identification on our ID.”

“Then what’s your real name?” she asked.

He smiled his benign smile again. “If I told you that, Peaches, I’d have to kill you.”

“Right.”

“No, really,” he said. In a way that made her think he wasn’t kidding.

“So I’m supposed to believe that this—” she glanced at the ID again “—Office of Political Unity and Security is legitimate?”

“Doesn’t matter if you believe it,” he replied. “It’s legit.”

“How come I’ve never heard of it?”

“Peaches, I’ve never heard of jalapeño-and-Gorgonzola ice cream. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

Well, gosh, who could argue with reasoning like that?

“Look, Santiago,” she said.

“Please, call me Dixon,” he told her in a voice that was the picture of politeness. “Everyone does. Well, for this assignment anyway.”

Avery refrained from commenting on that. And before her life had a chance to slip any further into the surreal than it already had, she said, “What do you want? Why are you here?”

“I’ll be happy to answer both of those questions,” he told her.

“Good.”

“Once you and I are in a secure environment.”

“Meaning?” she asked.

“Meaning someplace other than here,” he told her. Then, very graciously, he further offered, “I’ll drive.”

She’d really been afraid he was going to say something like that at some point. It was what had caused her to picture the outcome to this situation that he couldn’t be anticipating himself, what was going to ruin her day and her week and her month worse than anything else that had already happened tonight would. The only consolation she found in the realization was that it would ruin his day and his week and his month even more.

She folded his ID case and handed it back to him. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” she told him.

He accepted the case graciously and returned it to the inside pocket of his jacket. “I can’t wait to hear why.”

“Because I’m not going anywhere with you,” she said simply.

He expelled a sound that was a mixture of intention and resolution. “Actually you are,” he told her. “I was hoping you’d come along peacefully, but…” He shrugged. “Guess it’ll just have to be against your will now, that’s all.”

“That’s all?” she echoed incredulously. “You’re going to make me go with you? Against my will? Even though it will be a direct violation of my basic human rights, not to mention my civil rights, not to mention illegal?”

“It won’t be illegal,” he assured her with total confidence.

“It will be if you don’t have an arrest warrant.”

“An arrest warrant isn’t necessary in these circumstances.”

“So then I’m not under arrest?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then what exactly are the circumstances?”

“Well, for starters, it’s a matter of national security.”

She almost laughed out loud at that. Almost. Until she got a good look at his expression and realized he was serious. In spite of that, she said softly, “You’re joking.”

“Actually I’m not.”

She gaped at him. “What right do you have to take me anywhere?” she demanded. “I’m still not convinced that this organization you claim to work for even exists.”

“You’re just going to have to trust me on this one, Peaches. I have the jurisdiction and I’m not afraid to use it.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” she said. But her actions belied her defiant words, because to punctuate the statement she dug her heels into the sofa cushions and crossed her arms over her midsection in a clear gesture of self-preservation.

In response to her actions, he stood, facing her. Avery cowered deeply into the sofa, but he made no further move. Yet. In fact, he kind of looked as if she’d hurt his feelings by being scared of him.

Weird.

“Avery Nesbitt,” he said, his voice dripping with formality, “you’ve been summoned to appear for questioning at the Office of Political Unity and Security.”

“Summoned?” she repeated in a voice that was nowhere near as indignant as she had wanted it to be. “By whom?”

He ignored her question and continued in the same no-nonsense voice he had used before. “Should you decline this summons to appear voluntarily, you will be found in violation of three different statutes—”

“Oh, well, that sort of negates the whole voluntary thing, doesn’t it?” she said sarcastically.

“—and you will be brought in to the nearest OPUS office for questioning by an agent working for OPUS who is familiar with the charges against you.”

“Charges against me?” Avery said indignantly. “What charges? You said I wasn’t under arrest! I want to see these alleged ‘charges.’ In writing.”

Again he ignored her and continued. “And since I am such an agent—”

“Says a piece of paper that could have come out of a box of Cap’n Crunch,” she pointed out.

“—not to mention exceptionally good at bringing in people who violate statute—” he went on relentlessly.

“Oh, no ego on you, pal, is there?”

“—then that leaves me with no choice but to bring you in for questioning involuntarily.”

“I object!” Avery shouted. Mostly because she had no idea what else to say.

“Your objection is noted.”

“Oh, well, thank you so much for that measly considera—”

She was never able to finish what she had planned to say because Santiago Dixon—or whoever the hell he was—stepped forward and curled his fingers easily around her upper arms. And that, if nothing he’d said tonight, finally shut Avery up, because where she had expected roughness, he was gentle instead. When he pulled her to standing, it wasn’t with animosity but with concern. And when he tugged her away from the couch, that was done gently, too.

And if she hadn’t been silenced already, having her body pulled flush against his like that would for sure have done it. Because instead of manhandling her like a criminal, Santiago Dixon held her the same way he might have held a woman he intended to kiss. Her mouth went dry at the realization.

But she didn’t have time to think about that. And she didn’t have time to notice, either, the way his hard, muscular torso felt pressed against her own soft one or how upon contact her own traitorous body surged forward to meet his. Nor did she have time to marvel at how her struggles this evening with Santiago Dixon were the closest thing she’d had to a sexual encounter for a decade. Her mind was too scrambled, because he wrapped his fingers firmly—intimately?—around her waist. Then she couldn’t think at all, because he lifted her off the ground and threw her over one shoulder. Then he started to walk toward the front door. Then he opened the front door. And then, with Avery still slung over his shoulder, he walked through it.

Or at least tried to.

But there was one potential outcome for the situation tonight that he hadn’t considered, and that moment was when it kicked in.

Santiago Dixon hadn’t counted on the fact that Avery Nesbitt was totally whack.

CHAPTER FOUR

IT WAS ONLY ONCE THEY were over that Avery could really get a handle on what happened during her panic attacks. In the calm of the aftermath, she could recall the dizziness, the disorientation, the sheer, unmitigated terror. She could recall how her entire body trembled and perspired, could remember the paralysis of speech and interruption of breath. She could recollect the pain behind her eyes, the insensible workings of her brain, her certainty that she was going to die. Usually when she came out of an attack, she was curled into a fetal position on the floor of the shower stall or in the back of a closet, and she had a towel or article of clothing pressed hard against her mouth. That last, she’d always figured, was an unconscious effort to keep the psychological screaming from escaping through actual cries from her mouth.

But this latest panic attack, she realized as she gradually emerged from the fog, had been different. For one thing, she couldn’t remember ever fighting with corporeal monsters during one before. And she couldn’t recall ever shouting aloud threats to faceless menaces. Nor had she ever come out of an attack lying spread-eagle on her back, on a bare cot beneath a stark white fluorescent light, her wrists and ankles wrapped in leather restraints. Nor had she ever found herself being stared at from above by someone like Santiago Dixon, who seemed to be as breathless, as terrified and as insensate as she.

So this was a definite first.

“What happened?” she asked when she was coherent enough to manage it.

Before the question even left her mouth, though, she knew. Vaguely she remembered pounding on Dixon’s back and yanking at his hair and screaming something about how she would place certain parts of his anatomy into a variety of equipment normally reserved for torture and/or food processing. And also something about lepers and gargoyles. That part wasn’t too clear at the moment, so maybe he could help her fill in the blanks later.

But he didn’t help her out at all, only gazed at her in wide-eyed silence, as if he couldn’t quite figure out who or what she was. Then, “What happened?” he echoed incredulously.

She nodded weakly.

He shook his head almost imperceptibly, in clear disbelief. “You just about beat the hell outta me, that’s what happened. And you nearly gave my partner a concussion.” He jutted a thumb over his shoulder and glared at her some more. “And there are a couple of nurses out there filling out paperwork to enroll themselves in art school.”

“Oh,” Avery said. “I’m sorry.”

His lips parted marginally in surprise, but he said nothing more. His hat and jacket were gone, she noticed, and without them he seemed less menacing somehow. Until she bumped her gaze up to his face again and saw those cold green eyes and the jet-black hair spilling over his forehead. He seemed to be staring straight into her soul. And he seemed to not like what he saw there.

“Really,” she tried again. “I am sorry. I don’t usually attack people when that happens.”

“When what happens?” he demanded gruffly. “Just what the hell was that anyway? You were totally out of control.”

She hesitated, not wanting to share any part of herself with a total stranger she didn’t trust. Most especially she didn’t want to share the damaged part. Not that there were many parts of Avery that weren’t at least a little impaired. But he wasn’t the sort of person who would understand any of that. He was handsome, savvy, intelligent, confident. He wasn’t damaged at all. To try and explain to someone like him what it meant to be terrified of what he would consider nothing would only make her look crazier than she must already seem.

Still, she supposed she owed him an explanation. If nothing else, it might make him stop looking at her as if she were some kind of freak.

“It was a panic attack,” she said softly.

“A panic attack,” he repeated evenly.

Again she nodded. But she said nothing to elaborate. What else was there for her to say?

He shifted his weight to one foot, hooked his hands on his hips in challenge and flattened his mouth into a tight line. “Peaches, that was no panic attack. That was transglobal, thermodynamic warfare.”

She made a face at him. “Oh, stop it with the hyper-bole.” Although, now that she studied him more closely, she realized there was a big red spot on his cheek. “Look, I said I was sorry,” she said again. “It’s not like it’s something I can control. And usually it’s not that bad.”

“Just what is it then?”

She sighed. She wished she could tell him. At least in terms that wouldn’t make her sound weak and timid and nuts. Unfortunately, over the past several years, Avery had pretty much come to the conclusion that she was weak and timid and nuts. Which made her even more reluctant to tell him the truth.

In spite of that, she told him, “I wasn’t trying to be coy or uncooperative earlier when I told you I couldn’t go anywhere with you. I was telling you the truth. I can’t leave my apartment. Not without some serious preparation first.”

“What, like you need to make sure you have your wallet and house keys and a token for the subway?” he asked sarcastically.

“No. I can’t go out, because…” She sighed, resigned to revealing more of herself than she wanted him to know, because there was no other way to make him understand. “Because I have agoraphobia.”

He eyed her dubiously, “Which is what?” he asked. “Fear of the outdoors, right? But you weren’t outside yet when you went psycho.”

She tried to sit up, remembered that she was strapped down, so fell back against the cot with an exasperated sound. Honestly. Talk about overkill. So she’d roughed him up and called him a leper. So she’d nearly given someone a concussion. So she’d taken a couple of nurses out of commission. Like that didn’t happen every day in some boroughs of New York.

She tugged meaningfully at her restraints. “Let me up, will you?” she pleaded. “I’m fine now. I swear.”

“What you are is completely whack,” he countered. “Has anyone ever told you that?”

“Once or twice,” she said softly. Then, more forcefully, “I’m fine,” she repeated. She jerked at the restraints again. “Get me out of these things. Let me up. Please.”

Although he obviously didn’t believe her, he bent over her and, after a moment’s hesitation, cautiously unfastened one of her wrist restraints. But he waited before loosening any more, apparently wanting to take this thing slowly, in case she was still a little, oh, homicidal. After another moment, evidently satisfied that she wasn’t going to go all Hannibal Lecter on him again—probably—he carefully freed one of the ankle restraints, too. Then the other. Then finally the last, on her other wrist. Then he took a giant step backward and positioned himself near the door.

Where was she anyway? she wondered as she folded herself into a sitting position on the edge of the cot. It wasn’t quite a padded cell, but it was a tiny white room, empty save the cot on which she had been restrained, and there was a window in the door for observation from the other side. He’d mentioned nurses, so she must be in a hospital of some kind. God, she couldn’t even remember how she’d gotten here.

“What time is it?” she asked.

He flicked his wrist to glance at his watch, returning his attention to Avery in less than a nanosecond. “It’s ten after two.”

“A.m. or p.m.?”

“It’s two-ten in the morning,” he said. “You’ve been here for about an hour. But it took me and my partner almost an hour to get you here.”

Avery nodded, waiting for the panic to rise again, because she wasn’t in normal surroundings where she felt safe. Not that she ever really felt entirely safe in her normal surroundings. But nothing happened. She was a bit edgy, to be sure, but who wouldn’t be upon one’s discovery that one was in a strange place and couldn’t remember how one had arrived there? Not to mention when there was a man like Santiago Dixon staring at one as if one had just emerged from a pea pod from outer space?

“And just where is here?” she asked.

“You’re in an OPUS facility,” he told her.

Well, at least it wasn’t Bellevue.

“An OPUS psychiatric facility,” he clarified.

Oh. So it was Bellevue. Only without all the glamour and accountability.

She looked down at her attire, at the loud pajama bottoms and ragged purple sweatshirt. There was a rip in one sleeve that hadn’t been there before. One of her socks was missing, and the toenails of her one bare foot were painted five different colors. No telling how that had happened. The lost sock, she meant, since she had painted her toenails herself. One of her braids had come almost completely frayed. She looked at Dixon again, at the mark on his face for which she was responsible. She was lucky they’d only put her in restraints. Any other place would have performed a full frontal lobotomy by now.

Still, she wasn’t panicking here. The small, bare room didn’t frighten her the way most new surroundings did. And neither did Dixon’s presence in it. That had to be significant somehow, but she was too exhausted at the moment to try and figure it out.

“So tell me about this agoraphobia you have,” he said.

Avery reached for the unraveling braid and freed what little of it was still intact, then finger-combed her hair as best she could before going about the motions of plaiting it again. “Clinically,” she said as she wove the strands back together and avoided his gaze, “it’s defined as anxiety about being in a place or situation from which escape might be difficult or in which help may not be available in the event of having an unexpected panic attack or paniclike symptoms.”

“In layman’s terms?” he asked.

“It means I’m terrified of being someplace where I don’t feel safe,” she said simply. “And the only place I feel safe is my home. So anytime I have to leave my home, I am literally crippled by fear.”

What Avery didn’t add was that her agoraphobia had appeared after her release from prison and was a direct result of her incarceration. As bad as it had been to have her freedom revoked, in prison, for the first time in her life, she’d felt oddly safe. Strangely content. There was a strict system and regimen to life inside that had appealed to her. Everything was scheduled and everything went according to plan. Everyone was equal. The only thing that had been expected of her was that she stay out of trouble. And living in a place like that, Avery had felt no desire to get into trouble.

Not as she had growing up in East Hampton, where society’s strict rules—which had never made any sense to her—had dictated she behave in ways she didn’t want to behave. Growing up in the Hamptons, she had never felt like a worthwhile part of society, and because of that she had rebelled. Constantly. To her family she had always been a troublemaker. Behind bars, though…

As crazy as it sounded, behind bars Avery had felt free for the first time. Free to be herself. Free to say and think and feel what she wanted. Her activities had been curtailed, to be sure. But her mind and her emotions had been liberated. No one had censored her for her feelings or her thoughts or her dreams or her desires. No one had been disappointed by what went on in her head or offended by the things that came out of her mouth. On the contrary, she’d had friends inside, people who liked her because of who she was. And who she was was one of them—a person who wanted the world to work the way it was supposed to, and who had been disappointed by the workings of the world.

Not that there hadn’t been bad people in prison. Certainly there were a lot of women at Rupert Halloran who deserved to be behind bars and who were a genuine menace to society. But the ones to whom Avery had gravitated had been like her—victims of circumstance, women who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, women who had gotten involved with men they shouldn’t have. They’d understood Avery. Even when they discovered she came from a privileged background, they still understood her. And they liked her. And they considered her their equal. Prison was the only place where she had felt like a useful part of a meaningful society. Maybe it hadn’t been the kind of society that society appreciated. But Avery had appreciated it. And she’d been happy there.