Intimate Knowledge

He reminded her of those handsome backstage bums and one-night stands who had chased after her mother all those years.

The kind of man who promised nothing but heartache.

The kind of man she needed right now.

“As I said earlier, Harris Mitchell will only work with women. Directly, that is.” She fought to keep the businesslike detachment in her voice. “Word on the street is that as he gets ready to expand his enterprise, he’ll be hiring a new personal accountant. I intend to be that woman.”

“Word on the street?” Was that a swearword that hissed between his teeth? “What do you know about ‘word on the street’? How many times have you even been out of your cubicle?”

“If you’ll kindly watch your mouth, Agent Pierce.” Grace’s fingers trembled in their grip on the steno pad. “I’ve done my research—”

“I’ll bet you have.” He stopped circling and closed the distance between them. She felt the heat of him at her shoulder as he leaned in behind her, felt his hot, moist breath like a caress down the side of her neck. “But can you think on your feet? Be creative? Dodge bullets? Forget who you really are and become someone else?”

When she realized that the tempo of her own short breaths matched his, she took a step away and turned. She would not let this man distract her from her purpose.

“Commander Carmody gave me the green light for this project. I intend to go forward, with or without your help.”

As that hawk who had circled her earlier, Logan snatched her glasses from her face, plunging her world into a blur of smeared colors and lights and shadows.

“What are you doing?”

She reached out blindly, groping the air.

“Seeing if you have what it takes to go forward.”

“I can’t see a damn thing right now.”

“If you’ll kindly watch your mouth, Agent Lockhart.” He clicked his tongue behind his teeth in admonishment.

Embarrassed by the instinctive panic in her reaction, she hugged her steno pad to her chest, calming her fluttering heart and giving her shaking fingers something to do. “I am an excellent student, Agent Pierce. If this is some sort of test…” Her nose detected the smell of well-worn leather, and she guessed he’d circled behind her again. Pleased with her detection skills, she actually smiled. “I graduated top of my class. I’m a Phi Beta Kappa. I had personal recommendations from two senators for my appointment—”

“Yeah, yeah. But can you kiss a man and make him forget what he was thinking?”

With a magical snap of invisible fingers, he zapped her confidence and took her into uncharted territory. “I beg your pardon?”

“When it comes down to it, can you turn all that brain power into a seductive smile that Harris Mitchell will find irresistible?”

“I—”

She felt the heat of his lips brushing against her ear. “Can you do this…?” A vise clamped around her waist—Logan’s arm. She snatched at his leather sleeve to free herself, but froze as he pulled her back against him. Shoulders to chest. Hips to belt buckle. Bottom to…Grace squirmed at the vee of pure masculine heat that cupped her buttocks, not yet understanding the lesson he was teaching her. The long, strong fingers of his free hand seized her hip and stilled her struggle. “Without flinching?”

His lips moved to the column of nerves that ran down the side of her neck. “Can you let a man do this to you…?” She tilted her head to the side, straining away from his hot, moist assault on her senses. His tongue joined the foray, supping at an undiscovered indention where her neck met her shoulder. The electric current that had tingled beside her ear now shot out to the tips of her breasts, hardening her nipples, making the tender globes feel heavy above the restricting band of his arm. “And pretend you enjoy it?”

Pretend?

A damp mix of pleasure and pain gathered between her legs. Her hand, which had once tried to push him away, now tugged at his arm, unconsciously begging him to ease the friction gathering in the breasts it cradled.

Grace turned her jaw to his mouth, struggling to speak, fighting through the current of unaccustomed electric heat consuming her. He was making a point, she tried to remind herself, teaching her about working undercover.

“I should—” she stuck out the tip of her tongue and licked the circle of her parched lips, trying to regain control of the conversation—and her traitorous body “—be taking notes.”

He shifted his attention to the movement of her tongue and traced the same circle around her lips with an erotic rasp of his own tongue. The electric current humming through her transformed into an outright jolt. Her thighs clenched together and she lifted her bottom, rubbing herself against his bulging heat.

“Logan?” The sensation was too much. He was too much.

She was drowning. Falling. Building. Rushing.

She was alone.

Logan had released her and stepped far beyond her line of vision. He left her cold and exposed and swaying in the center of the room, counting silently to herself as she retrained her lungs to breathe in, then out, all over again.

As she gathered her senses, she could hear his measured breathing across the room. Was he sneering at her inexperience? Laughing at her combustible reaction to a simple embrace? Shaking his head over just how ill-suited she was for this task? His voice, which had rumbled in such a seductive pitch beside her ear, now clipped with all the command of a military officer. “That’s what you’ll have to do. If Mitchell suspects for one moment that you’re not sincere, you’ll be dead.”

Logan’s first lesson had bordered on virtual heaven. But the reality of his harsh words chased away the haze of sensual awareness and reminded her that he had yet to agree to work with her on the case.

“I’m aware of the danger, Agent Pierce. I’m not so naive as to believe there’s no risk involved in this assignment. That’s why I asked for your help.”

Reaching over her shoulder, he plucked the steno pad from her fingers.

“Hey!” She heard it land on something soft as he tossed it aside. The bombardment of man and lingering sex and unexpected actions made her jump when she felt his hands at her nape. “What are you doing now?”

“Seeing if I can help you.”

Logan’s deft fingers seemed to have had plenty of practice unfastening pins and rubber bands. He loosened her hair from its constrictive wrap and it fell around her shoulders down to the middle of her back. It had grown long and untamable, so she never wore it free. Even at night, she wove it into a braid to sleep.

But there was something…distracting…in the way he sifted the long strands through his fingers. Lifting it to test its weight, easing the pressure on her scalp. Something…soothing…in the way he draped it along her shoulder blades.

She should write this down. This feeling of being tended. This…

“It has a natural wave in it. Lots of potential—if you do something with it. We’ll cut it so the weight doesn’t pull it straight.”

His impersonal tone snapped her out of her foolish observations. It seemed he was doing his job. At last. She should remember her job, as well. “I’m prepared to alter my appearance.”

“I hope so.” He released her hair and stepped away. “The only way you’ll turn any man’s eye with that outfit is if you take it off. Let me have the jacket.”

“Agent Pierce, I hardly think—”

He was already tugging at the shoulders. Grace quickly unhooked the buttons before it ripped and he pulled it off.

“You want me for my expertise. I need to see what I have to work with.”

A whisper of wool gabardine landed in the corner somewhere. “This is a two-hundred-dollar suit, Agent Pierce.”

“You’ll have to cut the ‘agent’ crap. Call a man by his name.”

She felt the tug on the top button of her blouse before she saw his hand there. Grace swatted it away. “What do you think you’re doing—” she swallowed hard and forced herself to say his name “—Logan?”

“That’s better.” His hands returned, resuming their path down to her waist. “All of this has to go so I can assess what you’re asking of me. I’m all for getting Mitchell, but I don’t like impossible missions.”

“Impossible?”

Plain white cotton seemed no barrier for the man, either. He pushed the blouse down her arms and pulled it free of her waistband. It joined the jacket. In a self-conscious habit learned by the age of fourteen, she crossed her arms in front of her, laying her left hand on her right shoulder, her right hand at her waist, forming a shield of armor to mask every plump inch from an unkind word or critical eye.

His fingers moved to the zipper on her skirt.

Impossible, he’d said. That hurt. She had never flaunted her body. Not intentionally at any rate. Not once. She forced her mind away from the taunts and teasing of her adolescent peers. She shut down the memory of grown men leering at her, speaking to other parts of her anatomy instead of making eye contact.

At least Logan was denigrating her for the right reasons, not casting her aside as inconsequential because she’d managed to inherit one inescapable thing from her mother.

Make that two.

She was down to bra, half-slip, panties and hose before he pried her hands from their protective positions and spread her arms wide to either side of her.

Grace knew the exact moment when his gaze lit on her breasts. Though she couldn’t see his expression, she could imagine the surprise, maybe even admiration, and certainly interest that would cross his face.

Attached to a five-foot, five-inch body, a 40DD seemed to have that dumbing-down effect on a man.

Maybe he even noticed the ample hips, rounded to match, giving her body that out-of-date, out-of-place hourglass shape that had served her mother so well in the string of B-movies she’d starred in back in the 1970s.

That same shape that Grace had fought for years.

“I know I’m fat—”

“Fat?”

“—but there’s no way I can lose ten or twenty pounds in a week’s time. You’ll have to work with what’s here. If you’re willing to take the job, that is.”

Logan released her arms and she hugged herself again, praying the room’s rise in temperature was due to a faulty thermostat and not her own blushing skin.

“You’re worried about seducing a man with a body like that?”

“Yes! Why the hell else would I…”

The husky timbre of his voice registered. The low-pitched rumble skittered along her skin, raising goose bumps. His voice alone triggered the same electric switch that had left her body humming from his touch just moments earlier. Damn, she wished she could see his face. Was he calling her an idiot for not knowing how to use her mother’s gifts to full advantage? Or was there a note of promise in his tone that meant he was considering working with her?

“Does this mean you’ll be my partner?”

Above her own pounding heartbeat, his long-winded sigh was the only sound in the room. Grace squinted, trying to read his expression, trying to find out if that was a yes or a no. Though she could see his silhouette, he was just a big, broad blur to her eyesight.

“There are ten things I find sexy in a woman, Miss Lockhart—Grace. The first is when she looks me straight in the eye. You should write that down as rule number one in your little notebook.”

Grace began to hope. “Well, since you’ve conveniently taken my glasses and my notebook from me, there’s no way I can. And I asked you to call me Agent—”

Her words caught in a strangled gulp in her throat as Logan suddenly stepped into focus. That meant he was close enough to… The temperature went up another ten degrees. He was close enough…she could feel his measured breath stirring the tendrils of hair along her forehead. He was close… She was standing in her underwear and he was fully dressed. For decorum’s sake, she should move away.

And yet those steel-gray eyes ensnared her as if she was a helpless bird caught in his trap.

“Eye contact?” Oh, God, that quavering, wispy voice sounded so like her mother’s. “What are the other nine rules?”

He didn’t touch her, yet she could feel him. Their breaths mingled in a strangled heat. And she did her research. Up close like this, she could see the individual whiskers on his cheeks and jaw, dark little pinpricks that made her palms itch with curiosity to touch them.

Rule number one. Look a man in the eye.

She ran her gaze past the flat, flexing plateau of his lips and up beyond the slightly bent angle of his nose to those eyes. This close, she could see the silvery sunburst of color around his pupils, bewitching irises of dove-gray and steel and flint, rimmed by a darker shade of charcoal.

She’d never seen such beautiful eyes.

“Just like that,” he whispered, his words stirring a caress of air against her cheek.

Grace’s lungs expanded, as if just now remembering to breathe. The sudden intake of oxygen seemed to stir some coherent thought inside her brain.

“Does that mean you’re taking the assignment?”

“You’re going after Mitchell no matter what I say, aren’t you?”

Trapped by the unexpected warmth in those beautiful gray eyes, she could only nod.

“You’re clueless enough that somebody needs to watch your back.”

His shoulders shifted in her peripheral vision, and a moment later she felt the weight of silk-lined leather settling around her, enveloping her in Logan’s warmth and scent. She clutched his jacket together at her neck, but wondered if the tender gesture was the equivalent of another dismissive pat on the head.

“Will you be the one watching my back?”

He raked his gaze down along the swell of her breasts, giving her the distinct impression that he might be willing to watch even more. She pressed her lips together to quell the anticipation that raced through her, not trusting her ability to read a man’s thoughts.

“You have the raw materials to get the job done. But a rookie like you needs the best in the business to pull this off. You need me.”

There was less cocky arrogance in his statement than there was a reluctant acceptance of fact.

“So you’ll have me ready to go undercover by the end of the week…partner?”

“I won’t promise miracles. You still have nine rules to learn.” He pushed her glasses back onto her nose, plunging her back into plain-Jane obscurity and reminding her of the enormity of his task. “And don’t call me partner.”

WHO’D HAVE THOUGHT? The stunned question played through Logan’s mind again as he unpacked a second helmet from the back of his Harley-Davidson.

His body still ached from that torrid encounter back in the administration building with Grace. He thought he could scare her off from her foolish notion of going after Harris Mitchell. Knock some sense into that virginal determination of hers. But she’d been so soft to the touch, so responsive to his hands and mouth.

Teach her how to seduce a man?

She’d damn near seduced him.

And she didn’t even know it.

Grace Lockhart was deliberately disguising a national treasure. She was plain as a bucket until she lost her temper. But a little bit of makeup would get her noticed no matter her state of mind. She was blind as a bat, but contacts would help. She had soft hair with a tendency to curl that she controlled in an unflattering bun. A reputable salon would know what to do there.

But beneath that gray, shapeless suit—

Who’d have thought?

She might be the brainy strategist Carmody claimed, but she had inexperience written all over her. Sexual and professional. He had to make her smarter. Teach her survival skills. Teach her to mentally detach herself from a man’s touch when she was working undercover, to look at him with those liquid green orbs and make him think he had just given her the best sexual rush of her life.

A look like that could make a man think the cuddling and fondling and kissing they shared was the real thing.

Logan raked his fingers through his hair and struggled to find a similar detachment. He had five days to mold Grace Lockhart into a savvy, sexy field agent who could bring Harris Mitchell to his knees, and then walk away unscathed. Did he really think he could pull this off? Or was he just too afraid that nobody else understood the consequences of failure?

A sobering image of Roy Silverton’s bullet-ridden body blipped into his mind and reaffirmed his decision to take this assignment. He had to do this right. He hadn’t prepared Roy for every contingency. But he’d make double sure Grace knew how to take care of herself. How to think on her feet.

And what he couldn’t teach her, he’d take care of himself. He’d keep her alive.

To do that, he couldn’t let himself be distracted by the temptation of that goddesslike figure. He had to play this like a pro. Keep his mind focused on the mission. Keep Grace in one piece, not take her to his bed.

The scuff of her flat-heeled oxfords on the asphalt pavement announced her arrival long before she said a word.

“You’re joking, right?”

He watched her look down at the slim fit of her skirt and up at the back seat of his Harley. She thumbed over her shoulder toward the center of the parking lot. “My car’s just over there. We could take it to lunch, instead.”

“Sensible sedan, right?”

She nodded. “Safe. Good mileage—”

“We’ll requisition a new car for you. Something sporty. Red, I think.” Lustful thoughts of long blond hair blowing across the back seat of a red convertible eased the doom and gloom that had consumed him. A nice roomy back seat where…

“I would prefer blue. Or green.”

Logan opened his eyes and shook his head at her earnest expression. She’d rebuttoned her gray-suited armor up to her neck, and fastened her hair back into that tight little bun. She hadn’t even left any curling wisps free to soften her face. Instead, she’d added a functional black shoulder attaché to the outfit. Probably where she carried that ever-present notebook.

She just didn’t get it, did she? Men would salute that body of hers. Harris Mitchell would voluntarily go to prison for that body. He, personally, would sacrifice a well-earned vacation for the opportunity to know that body better—once he got her through this assignment.

He had to teach her to get comfortable with her fantasy-proportioned figure. To use it to her advantage.

Oh, yeah.

“Definitely red.”

Logan reached into his jeans and pulled out his pocketknife. Confused, distrusting perhaps, Grace took a step back when he knelt in front of her. “What are you—?” With a grasp and a twist, he slit the seam of her skirt. “Hey!”

He preferred that flash of fire in her cheeks to her usual pasty-faced demeanor.

“If you want to work undercover, you have to be willing to take risks. Willing to do what you don’t normally do. Willing to do whatever’s necessary to get the job done.” He punctuated his first bit of advice by ripping the seam of her skirt up to the hemline of her jacket.

“Oh, my God. You ruined it.”

Logan stood, smiled, put away his pocketknife, and enjoyed the twists and turns of her body as she struggled first to assess the damage, and then to tuck her slip up beneath the thigh-high slit. “Don’t worry, just make a note of it. The agency will reimburse you. C’mon.”

He put on his helmet, buckled the second one around the flushed fury of her face and climbed onto the Harley. When he had the engine purring smoothly beneath him, he extended his hand for Grace.

“I’ve never been on a motorcycle before.”

He’d guessed as much. He steadied her while she tested one foothold and then another, finally climbing aboard as if it were a horse waiting to buck her off. She settled astride the seat, behind him, leaving a good five inches of space between them. “What do I do?”

Logan grinned. “Hold on, sweetheart.”

He could barely feel the pressure of her fingertips at his waist. Definitely not the way a sexy woman held on to her man. Time to teach her another lesson.

“Just hold on.”

He revved the engine and kicked it into gear, pulling the bike up to forty miles per hour before even reaching the security gate. By the time he had her on the highway cruising toward New York City, Grace had become a second skin to him, her face buried in the middle of his back and her arms cinched around his middle. He glanced down at her white-knuckled grasp on his belt buckle.

Oh, yeah.

Between her body and his guilty conscience, the next five days were going to be one hell of a ride.

3

GRACE WATCHED Logan slip twenty dollars to the maître d’. “Is the agency going to pick up the tab for that, too?”

Logan smiled at her sarcasm and urged her along in front of him.

Despite his casual attire and her torn skirt, they were seated in the center of the plush Willingham Hotel restaurant, amid tables filled with businessmen and women dressed more appropriately and impeccably in suits. Keenly conscious of several curious stares, Grace opened her menu and hid her face behind it.

Once their arrival became old news and the patrons returned to their own conversations, she slapped the menu shut and leaned forward. “What the hell are we doing here?”

Logan had unzipped his jacket and sprawled back in his chair. With his long legs hidden beneath the white linen tablecloth, he sipped on a glass of water topped with a twist of lime. “I believe it’s called lunch.”

“I said I was happy to eat at the hot dog vendor’s down on the corner.”

At the snap of her whisper, Logan set down his glass and leaned forward, as annoyingly relaxed in their posh surroundings as she was self-conscious. “Hot dogs are a whole other lesson. You want to seduce a big-time crime lord. So we have to learn the big-time lessons first. Mitchell’s got money out the wazoo. You’re going to have to look like you’re at home in places like this.” His eyes lit with amusement at her expense. “So far you’re not doing very well, Gracie.”

She stiffened at the nickname, hearing the cutesy, belittling appellation like a hundred bad memories slapping her in the face. “Never call me Gracie. I am a twenty-six-year-old professional law enforcement officer. Grace or Agent Lockhart will do just fine.”

He patted the air with his hands, placating her. “Don’t be so eager to defend yourself. Keep your temper. Grace, it is.”

At least he’d allow her that one smidgen of respect. She had a feeling she’d have to swallow plenty of pride before this mission was accomplished. She pulled out her steno pad and opened it to the page where she’d listed ten numbers.

“Is that one of your rules?” She clicked her mechanical pencil and prepared to write. “Play it cool? I can do that.”

He reached across the table and stilled her hand. Sensing her instinct to jerk away from the personal contact, his long, calloused fingers wrapped around hers, pencil and all, trapping her in a vise of velvet and steel. Short of stabbing him with a fork or screaming her head off, she was his prisoner.

She shot him as damning a glance as she could muster through her glasses.

“Control, Grace.” Logan shook his finger at her like the recalcitrant pupil she was. “I’m talking about control. A man likes the challenge of breaking that control. You want to be his match, not easy pickings. He wants to earn his reward.”

Something about the softly articulated movement of his lips distracted her from the need to assert herself. The husky pitch of his voice, whispered for her ears alone, seeped inside her like a promise.

She heard her voice in the same soft whisper. “What’s your reward in all this?”

“Walking away from this assignment with you in one piece.”

“I can handle myself.”

Without blinking, those silvery eyes fixed on hers, capturing her curiosity, demanding her attention. Logan pulled her hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to the inside of her wrist. Grace jumped in her chair, shocked by the bubbling heat that simmered beneath the firm, warm pressure of his lips against her pulse. The whiskers on his chin abraded an apparently sensitive patch of skin there, sending out thousands of tiny little aftershocks in the kiss’s wake.