left a bad taste in his mouth. He shrugged it off and went back to thinking about Samantha Hanley in his bed, a much more pleasant topic.
SAM STOOD by her dresser and listened to the noises in the living room. Reese Moretti was making up the couch for himself. She’d never had a man in her apartment before. Up until a few weeks ago, she’d never had an apartment.
She took a deep breath and walked out with the pillow and blanket she was holding. Better do it before she lost her nerve.
“Here.” She held out the bedding and gestured toward the couch. “Sorry, it’s the best I can do.”
All the women on the team got one-bedroom apartments. It hadn’t seemed necessary to spring for more. They spent most of their time at the office or snooping around at the various business functions the island’s elite hosted, trying to figure out who else might be doing business with Tsernyakov. The man had money coming to the island through a maze of channels. They couldn’t just sit back now that they had Cavanaugh. With a guy like Tsernyakov, one needed many backup plans.
“The powder room is all yours,” she said, not mentioning the obvious, that to shower he would need to use her bathroom. She’d spent an hour that morning cleaning it.
She hadn’t grown up in an orderly environment and at times had trouble remembering to put things away. She was improving, though. And she had paid special attention for Reese Moretti’s sake.
The idea was for the two of them to spend as much time together as possible, since, in twenty-four hours, they would have to sell Cavanaugh on the idea that they were romantically linked. That made her more nervous than the rest of the mission put together. They needed to get to know each other and become comfortable with the situation in a hurry.
“Thanks.” He glanced up, looking just like David, and yet different in so many ways. He tested the couch, wearing the same grim expression as he had since his arrival a couple of hours ago—one of the many differences between the twins. David didn’t do grim.
The azure-blue Naugahyde monster that came with the apartment was hard as a chunk of sidewalk. “Sorry,” she said again.
“Don’t sweat it. I just spent a month sleeping in the bush in Africa.”
She couldn’t picture David, always dressed in some sleek silk suit, say anything like that. “Under a bush?” She’d spent plenty of nights on the street; she could sympathize.
But he shook his head with a semiamused look. “In the bush. It’s an expression. Just means out in the wild, wherever you find a convenient piece of ground when night falls.”
Reese dropped the bedding at the end of the couch. His movements weren’t as elegant as David’s. He was more soldierlike, watchful and alert, his dark gray eyes penetrating. There was effortless strength to everything he did, his posture, his gaze; it even came through in his voice. He was clearly used to giving orders, had grilled her for a good hour after the briefing he had received from Nick Tarasov and Brant Law.
After spending most of the evening with him, skirting him warily in the small apartment, she hadn’t gotten a handle on him yet.
He sat and kicked off his safari boots, then leaned back on the couch, rubbed a hand over his face as he looked around once again, his mouth set in a tight line of disapproval.
David Moretti’s smooth and easygoing ways made her frazzled, but it took Reese’s brusque manner to get her really nervous. David had that benign, gentlemanly air about him. Reese didn’t.
“You can have the bedroom if you want.” The words came out of her mouth without thought or intention.
“Sofa’s fine.”
“Is something wrong?” Now, why would she ask that? She should have just walked away. Her nerves made her mouth run.
He watched her carefully for a long moment before he responded. “I spent the last four months in Uganda between two rebel factions, risking my team for a man who turned out to have been dead the whole time. We came back with seven gunshot injuries between the four of us.”
Clearly, he didn’t want to be here. She wondered how Brant and Nick had managed to talk him into it. From the look on his face, he wasn’t going to be a lot of fun to be around.
A single week, that was all. She could handle that standing on one foot. She’d been forced to put up with worse company in the past. The years she had spent at Brighton Federal Correctional Institute came to mind.
“Okay, I’ll leave you to get some rest.” She backed toward her bedroom.
“We don’t have much time. We’d better get to work,” he said, and when she looked at him blankly, added, “We are supposed to get to know each other.”
What did he call the hour-long interrogation he’d put her through earlier in the kitchen? Or was he going to finally reveal more about himself? She drew a deep breath and walked back, sat gingerly in the armchair opposite him.
“Nick Tarasov tells me you’re good with a gun,” he said with some undisguised doubt in his voice. “He seemed confident that you could handle yourself in a hand-to-hand tussle, too, in your own weight group.” He looked her over as if he was measuring her ounce by ounce and ended up with an expression that said she wasn’t quite up to snuff.
She resisted the urge to pull herself taller. “I went through the training” was all she said.
He raised a dark eyebrow. “So you think you can handle whatever comes your way?”
“I’m not stupid.”
The eyebrow went back down. There might have been a shadow of approval that crossed his face before he put forward his next question. “How long have we supposedly known each other?”
“Three months.” That was how long she’d been out. Where had the time gone?
“How much nudity are you comfortable with?” His gaze was sharp on her face, unflinching.
The question brought her up short. What did that have to do with anything? And yet, after a second, she had to admit that the question was relevant. Cavanaugh thought Reese—pretending to be David—was her lover. She swallowed, her already frazzled nerves buzzing as if she were undergoing electroshock therapy. “Very little.”
When you spent your teenage years on the streets, you strove to cover as much as possible, look as un-appealing as possible, as scary as possible. It had been part of her defense mechanism. She’d hidden behind the darkest of Goth looks, complete with chains and studded chokers, and complemented it all with a tongue and gaze as sharp as razors.
Prison had taken away most of her props. Anita had been working on her to make her see the lack of necessity for the rest. She wasn’t quite there yet, but even Sam had to admit that she had mellowed. She was no longer frightened of everything, so in turn she no longer wanted to frighten anyone who so much as looked at her.
The concept of nudity, however, especially in the same context with Reese, scared her. She searched for a cutting remark to disguise that fact.
“We are going to a beach party,” he said dryly before she could come up with one.
She had an image
