good looks. He was a man’s man … heck, he was a woman’s kind of man, too. Those blue-on-blue eyes of his, the thick, dark hair cropped short, the strong features, direct stare—
Without warning, her shoe heel caught on the doorjamb and her right ankle rolled out from under her. She pitched forward and slammed face first into her boss’s rock-solid chest.
“Hey, Mendez,” someone laughed behind her, “you don’t have to be that obvious about throwing yourself at the guy!” More laughter ensued.
Her cheeks flamed. Whoever said fair-skinned women were the only ones cursed with blushing when they were embarrassed had never met her. Her golden complexion turned beet-red with the best of them, thank you very much. Of course, she never really blushed except when she did something humiliating around Jim Kelley. And that happened a great deal more often than she liked to think about.
“Walk much?” he murmured, setting her back on her feet. “Maybe you should stick to flats, kid.”
Face on fire, she glared in the general direction of his chin and mumbled, “Yeah, whatever.” She was such a dork. She couldn’t even walk past the guy without falling all over herself.
“You need help getting to a chair?” he asked dryly.
She hoped that was a rhetorical question because she had no intention of answering him. She sat down on the cursed chair, and then remembered she was wearing a skirt. She should turn a little to angle her skirt away from him enough that she wasn’t inviting him to look up it.
She swiveled in the seat, but, of course, the danged skirt didn’t swivel with her. The stupid thing wrapped around her thighs so tightly she feared a seam would pop any second. She half rose to twist it back into place. But in trying to be subtle about it, she was a little too subtle and lost her balance. She fell back onto the chair, barely catching enough seat to stay in it and the thing rocked ominously to one side. She managed to right both herself and the chair, but not before Jim smirked openly at her from behind his desk.
“I swear, Al, I’ve never met anyone as clumsy as you in my whole life.”
She almost stuck her tongue out at him, but they weren’t kids any more. And besides, she was only a klutz around him.
The grin faded from his face and his stare went all manly again. “What’s up, Mendez?”
It might be common usage to call people by their last names in the army, but coming from him, it made her feel … ugly. Nerves jangled like broken power lines in her stomach. She asked as lightly as she could muster, “Where’s the team mission to this time?”
“Secretary of State’s going to East Africa to discuss the piracy problem with various leaders over there. We’re providing supplemental security.”
That was a particularly dangerous corner of the world. Delta Company stood a more-than-fair chance of seeing combat on the job. She announced, “I want to go with them.”
“So do I. But that doesn’t mean either of us gets to do it.”
“I’m serious. I’ve been attached to this unit for a full year and I haven’t been out on a single field op.”
“You’ve been on tons of ops,” he retorted.
“Sitting in a van a hundred miles from the deployment and babysitting satellite feeds is not a real op. I want to be where the action is.”
Jim’s expression hardened. “Not happening. You’re a rookie. You’re a female. And your dad would kill me if I let anything happen to you.”
She snapped, “Rookie techs go out in the field with the unit all the time. And you’ve sent a woman into a hot combat zone before—”
“Yeah, and look how that turned out.” His gaze strayed to the wall of photographs of fallen heroes under a banner declaring them never to be forgotten.
“—and as for my dad, I’m an adult and this is my job. He can get over it.”
“You’re inexperienced. I can’t risk my men’s lives with you. When you’ve got more field experience, maybe we’ll talk about it.”
He’d set up a neat catch-22 and snagged her squarely in its logic. She demanded, “And how, exactly, am I supposed to get more field experience if you won’t ever put me out there?”
Exasperation poured off the guy, but she, frankly, didn’t care. She was pretty darned exasperated herself.
“Do you have a report from Chandler’s office for me or not?” Jim asked implacably. He obviously thought the discussion about sending her to Africa was over.
“I’ll go over your head,” she threatened. “I can claim discrimination, you know.”
He leaned forward, palms pressed flat on his desk, and glared at her. “As long as you’re attached to this unit, you work for me. My decision. My call. I say you stay right where you are. It took my superiors a year to get someone into Senator Chandler’s office. And I’m not about to pull you out.”
Frustration and hurt warred for supremacy in her gut. She was really, really good at her job. Nobody was better with high-tech gadgetry than she was. She’d earned a chance to do her job for real in combat. He was just being pig-headed and chauvinistic. “If you don’t think I’m good enough at my job to let me do it, then why don’t you let me go back to my own battalion where my work will be appreciated?”
He momentarily looked stricken, but then he snarled, “If you do something intentional to make me fire you, you won’t be getting any jobs in tech ops again any time soon. I’ll see to it.”
She jumped to her feet and miraculously managed to get vertical without mishap. “How dare you threaten me!”
His jaw muscles worked angrily. “You threatened me first, Mendez, and I don’t take kindly to that.” His gaze speared into her coldly. “You have your orders. I expect you to stay put in Chandler’s office and keep watching for anything out of the ordinary. You’re going nowhere until you get the dirt on the guy. Is that understood?”
She was so furious she didn’t trust herself to speak aloud. She nodded stiffly before pivoting and marching to the door. At least she hoped it looked like marching. Disconcertingly, in the narrow skirt and heels, it felt more like mincing than marching. She gave his door a satisfyingly loud slam on the way out, though. Jerk.
He wanted the dirt on Chet Chandler, did he? Oh, she’d give him dirt. In fact, she knew just how to get it. She glanced at her watch. Almost five o’clock. Senator Chandler had a dinner meeting tonight with some caucus group. And whenever he left the office, the rest of the staff usually checked out pretty soon thereafter. She’d give it a couple of hours and then she’d move in for the kill.
Her idea was risky. Arguably stupid. If she got caught she’d be fired from Chandler’s staff for sure, and then Jim would be really mad at her. Tough. She was going to hack into Chet Chandler’s personal computer. And then in a few days, before next week’s no-notice system sweep by the FBI, she’d unhack the senator’s computer.
It had cost her hundreds of dollars’ worth of beers and countless hours of deadly, dull baseball talk with her “buddy” from the FBI cyber-crime unit to find out when the
