Nineteen

At one in the morning, Sara flicked off Bayard’s wide-screen TV, walked out to the kitchen and made herself a hot drink. Winding her fingers around the mug and slowly sipping hot chocolate, she strolled around Bayard’s lounge, studying the books on his shelves, a series of watercolors done by his grandfather of the Shreveport countryside and the odd piece of football memorabilia scattered around the room.

She felt alert and unsettled, and not just because she had deciphered another coded message.

Bayard had been gone for more than three hours.

The thought had passed through her mind that he wasn’t working, that he was simply with Lissa, then she dismissed it. She had known Bayard for most of her life. In some ways she knew him as well as she knew Steve. He was as ruthless in his personal relationships as he was in his career, but he operated to a rigid code. He had dated a long list of beautiful women, but according to Steve, the ground rules had always been clear-cut. Bayard only ever dated one at a time, and when it was over, it was over.

The fact that he had openly declared his interest was subtly reassuring. Bayard was close to family. He wouldn’t touch her if all he wanted was a short-term fling.

Nothing had been said, but at a primitive level the first and most basic foundation of a relationship had been laid. He’d claimed her in front of Rousseau and his men, and she had capitulated.

Ever since that frantic kiss in the kitchen, she had been on edge, sharply aware that she wanted him, that the logical conclusion to the kiss was lovemaking.

The thought that Bayard could, conceivably, date her for a time, sleep with her, then end the relationship, wasn’t an option. She didn’t love easily and, since he had never committed to marriage, she was willing to bet that neither did Bayard. But that didn’t change the fact that falling for him was tantamount to stepping off a cliff. She was acutely aware of huge blank spaces in his life she knew little or nothing about.

Bayard was an alpha male and a self-professed overachiever. He had walked out on a promising law career to become an FBI agent. In the space of little more than a decade, he had made division head. Not satisfied with the FBI fast track, he had switched to National Intelligence. She didn’t know exactly what he did there, and that was the scariest thing of all; when she’d asked him on the flight, his job description had sounded like a mission statement. Instead of controlling agents and operations, he appeared to control entire networks.

She rinsed her cup, placed it in the dishwasher and walked through to the sitting room. She picked up the remote and flicked through a number of channels. Unable to settle, she turned the set off. She was on the point of going to bed when Bayard stepped through the front door and dropped his briefcase on the floor. He walked toward her, and perversely she wished she had gone to bed. Waiting up for him suddenly seemed too needy.

Awareness flashed in his gaze. Seconds later, his mouth was on hers, his fingers digging into the soft flesh of her bottom, jerking her close. Lifting up on her toes she wound her arms around his neck. The passion was white-hot and instant, the relief of her breasts flattened against his chest, the jut of his penis digging into her belly, burning away the gnawing insecurities.

Wrenching his mouth free, he dragged her sweatshirt and the soft, sheer tank she was wearing up and over her head and discarded it, baring her breasts. Dipping his head, he took one nipple in his mouth.

Sensation jerked through her in hot, dizzying waves. She tore at his shirt and found naked skin. Seconds later, she was on her back on the carpet, Bayard’s mouth on hers. Impatiently, he shrugged out of the shirt and tossed it to one side. His fingers hooked in the waistband of her sweats and hauled them down, taking her panties with them. Cold air circulated around her bottom and thighs. The carpet was rough and prickly against her bare skin, but the discomfort barely registered as he came down between her legs. She fumbled at the fastening of his trousers, dragging the zipper down, and felt him, blunt and engorged, nudging between her legs. His gaze locked with hers. A second later he shoved deep and the room dissolved.

She had a moment to consider that he hadn’t used a condom, that he was naked inside her, then the driving rhythm shoved her over the edge.

   

Long minutes later, she stirred. Bayard had rolled over and pulled her with him so that she was lying half across him. At some point he had dispensed with his pants, socks and shoes and was now fully naked. One big hand was locked lazily over her bottom, keeping her leg draped over his hip and her pelvis angled so that he was still lodged inside her.

Just feet away, rain was pounding on the windows, the faint chill reaching through the glass, but she wasn’t cold. Heat poured from Bayard. Wherever they touched their skin was glued together with perspiration.

She shifted slightly, adjusting her hips and felt him firm and extend inside her. One lazy hand swept up, cupping her breast and the low level throb in her belly sharpened. She lifted up on her elbows, her hair falling in a dark curtain around them and delicately, deliberately, clenched around him. “Shall we go to bed?”

He rolled her onto her back, lifted his hips and slid back into her with one gliding stroke.

“Not yet.”

* * * 

At four in the morning, Bayard pulled her to her feet and they finally made it to his bed.

He jerked back the covers, waited for her to climb in, then flicked on the lamp and slid in beside her.

She snuggled in closer and let her eyes drift closed.

Bayard propped himself on an elbow, one hand cupped lazily around her breast. “Are you likely to get pregnant?”

Her eyes popped open. The question, after what had happened, was incredibly mundane, but pertinent. She didn’t need to count. Her period was due in a few days. “It’s possible. I ovulated last week.”

“Then there’s no point in using a condom until after your period. If you get one.”

“Why do I get the idea that won’t bother you?”

His hand slipped down over her rib cage and spanned her abdomen. “If you’re pregnant, you’re pregnant. There’s nothing we can do about it now.”

“I could take a morning-after pill.”

He looked briefly incensed. “Have you ever had to do that before?”

“No.” She had never had wild, unplanned, unprotected sex in her life. Bayard was a first in a number of respects.

“Good,” he said with evident satisfaction. “Don’t do it this time. If you’re pregnant, we’ll deal with it. Thank God you didn’t ever get married.”

An odd note in his voice caught her attention. “What would happen if I had?”

“You wouldn’t have.”

“I had boyfriends.”

“Like that guy you dated about three years back. What was his name? Oh, yeah, Les Culver. A councilor.”

The fact that Bayard not only knew Les’s name, but knew when she had dated him, rang alarm bells. “How did you know I dated Les?” She had dated a number of men over the years. Les was significant only because he had been the last one.

“Jay Guidry.”

Now she was wide-awake. Jay Guidry was a detective working for the Bossier PD. “You had me surveilled?”

He looked impatient. “I wouldn’t call it that, exactly.”

“What then?”

“Calm down. I just got Jay to check on you every now and then.”

“Why?”

His expression was unrepentant. “Steve was gone. You were alone except for your Dad, and he was sick.”

A small piece of an almost forgotten puzzle dropped into place. When she had been dating Les, he had ended it, not her, which had been unusual. The relationship hadn’t exactly been hot and heavy, which had been precisely the reason it had lasted so long. At the time she had been certain that Les had been warned off.

Her father, who hadn’t liked Les, had denied it. Steve had been overseas at the time, so she hadn’t been able to blame Les’s default on him. “It was you. You warned Les off. I thought it could have been Steve, even though he was away, but he never admitted to it. Why?”

He bent and kissed her, the kiss oddly sweet. “Why do you think?”

   

At seven in the morning, Bayard took the message Sara had decoded through to his office while she pulled on one of his shirts and walked through to the kitchen to make coffee.

When he took the cup she handed him, he pulled her close for a leisurely kiss before starting on the coffee. “There’s only one thing happening in town this week and that’s a water conference. Nasser Riyad. He’s the leader of a small, independent Arab territory, with huge oil reserves and a U.S. strategic air base. He styles himself as above politics but the reality is that he has a foot in each camp, cutting deals with the West while doing business with terrorist factions on the side.”

“So now what? Check Nasser’s Washington connections?”

“And his investment base. In 1984, when Hartley betrayed Reichmann, threatening the cabal with exposure, she liquidated assets and moved substantial sums of money. The problem has been finding where she moved it. If we can tie Nasser’s oil shares to Helene, or any other member of the cabal, we can freeze the assets and impound them.”

Bayard picked up his phone and began making calls. Thirty minutes later, Lissa called back. They had tracked down two major buys of Riyad’s shares in 1984, by two separate companies. After checking with Inland Revenue, who had searched their database, they had established that both companies were owned by the same parent company. They were still fighting their way through a labyrinth of offshore shell companies, but they were finally getting somewhere.

Sara took one look at his complete focus and quietly left his office. It was Sunday, but evidently Bayard’s people worked 24-7, and he was expected in at the office. She had a shower, changed into sweats and a tank top and tied her hair back in a ponytail, then padded out to the kitchen to see if Bayard had the makings of breakfast in his fridge.

Half an hour later she slid a large cheese omelet onto a warmed plate, cut off one-third for herself, transferred it to another plate, then divided bacon and a salsa she’d cobbled together from avocadoes, tomatoes and lime juice between the two plates. She checked the oven and noted that the biscuits she’d made from the unopened pack of mix she’d found in Bayard’s pantry were almost done.

She knocked on the door of the study and opened it. Bayard swiveled around in his chair. His gaze shifted to her breasts and she logged the moment that his focus changed.

A small shiver went through her as he pushed out of his chair and walked toward her. Sometime in the last hour he had rolled up his shirtsleeves and undone the top buttons of his shirt, baring a slice of tanned chest and dark, curling hair. “We have to eat first.”

“That’s what I had in mind.”

She opened the door wider, so the smell of fried bacon could waft through.

His expression changed. “You cooked?”

She walked back to the kitchen, her cheeks burning because she could feel his gaze locked on her butt. “It’s an old Southern tradition.”

“My mother didn’t cook. If there’s food, don’t let me touch you until we’ve eaten.”

Grabbing a kitchen towel, she pulled the oven door open, slid the pan of biscuits out and deposited it on a heatproof pad she’d placed on the counter.

The expression on Bayard’s face got even stranger. “You made biscuits.”

She found butter. There weren’t any jams or preserves, which strengthened the theory that Bayard had probably bought the biscuit mix so one of his girlfriends could make them for him, and in the process had neglected to buy jam.

When she set the butter down on the counter, he grabbed her, lifted her clear off her feet and kissed her hard on the mouth. Setting her down, he took a seat at the counter, picked up his fork and began to eat, that same glazed look in his eyes. Finally she got it. The food was basic, down-home cooking, but for Bayard it was pure magic. His enjoyment of such a simple thing as a hot biscuit told her something else she needed to know about him. As high-flying as Bayard was in the intelligence world, his needs and his instincts were the same as most other men.

   

Twenty minutes later, when the security detail Marc had requested were in place around the apartment, he left for the office. He didn’t want to leave. After waiting this long for Sara, all he wanted was to be with her. Drinking coffee, making love, watching TV or fighting, he didn’t care.

He was thirty-six and he had wanted Sara for most of his life. He had tried to get her when he was twenty and failed. He wasn’t about to let her slip away this time.

Satisfaction curled through him at the thought that he might have made her pregnant. It wasn’t a guarantee, but close enough.

As he climbed into his car, he slipped back into work mode. The last piece in the cabal puzzle settled into place. Over the past few months he had unraveled the network, using information gleaned from investigations into the senior cabal members who had been murdered by Lopez and Helene. The scenario had unfolded in a predictable way. Helene and her aging court had been using money and political influence to play the war game, mostly in innocuous, low-risk ways. The result had been budgetary allocations that benefited certain arms corporations in which the cabal held a large number of shares.

Those had since been frozen, the sales history tracked, but at no point had any of the transactions led them to Helene, because she’d been clever enough to keep herself separate from the upper echelon. Two names had consistently surfaced with the multinationals: Seaton and Ritter. Both of those men were now dead, cutting off that avenue of investigation.

Helene had operated as a separate entity within the cabal, controlling the major assets and the accounts, making it easy to detach herself from it once it had gone belly up. But, as politically savvy as she was, she had made one major mistake. She had thrown in with Nasser, and from the coded threats, he was almost certain Lopez knew about it.

His cell phone rang as he pulled out into traffic. It was Bridges.

“Guess what?”

“Dennison?”

“Uh-huh. He just got into town.”

“Keep the tail on him.”

Dennison had an intimate knowledge of both Lopez and the cabal. When he had exited the country the previous year, after escaping CIA custody, Marc had made the decision not to have him arrested on the basis that Dennison was more use to him freelancing than kept under wraps in a cell.

So far, he hadn’t pointed the way to any leads they hadn’t already generated for themselves, but the possibility was there. If Lopez and Helene sank from sight, Dennison could conceivably be useful.

“What about Juan and Benito Chavez?” The two men in the four-wheel drive who had been Lopez’s backup at the Fischer farm.

“They’re heading for El Paso.”

“Pull them in before they get to the border.”

They’d hung off long enough. Benito would never be anything more than muscle, but his older brother, Juan, was Lopez’s right-hand man. He was also smart enough to pick up the pieces of the Chavez cartel and put them back in business once Lopez was out of the equation. It was time to close the net.