she’d elected not to wear them.
Zoë drew in a deep breath and let it out. She was as ready as she could be to have sex with Jed Calhoun, so why then was she sitting here staring at the Chesapeake instead of propositioning Jed on Ryder Kane’s houseboat?
Closing her eyes, Zoë rested her head against the steering wheel. Because she was afraid. What if he said no? What if he didn’t feel the same way that she did? He’d pulled away from that kiss, hadn’t he? When he’d walked away from her at the Blue Pepper, she’d had to lean against that wall for three full minutes before the feeling had come back into her legs.
Interesting is what he’d called that kiss. Devastating is what she’d called it. Zoë raised her head from the steering wheel and opened her eyes. Bottom line—she was afraid of what she’d always been afraid of—that she wouldn’t, couldn’t, live up to someone else’s expectations.
Zoë lifted her chin. Well, Jed Calhoun might reject her. She was just going to have to risk it.
For the third time, she picked up the set of directions Sierra had dictated over the phone and studied them. She was going to find that houseboat. Wasn’t the third time supposed to be the charm? And then one way or another, she was going to find a way to handle the Jed problem once and for all.
Shifting the car into reverse, she glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a dark SUV move through the crossroad twenty yards behind her. She might not have given it a second glance if it hadn’t been for the fact that she’d seen it before—once on the main highway, and another time on the maze of roads that all seemed to inevitably dead-end at the water. So she wasn’t the only one challenged by the dead-end roads in the area. Feeling somewhat cheered, she backed up, turned the car around and sped up the road.
THE BREEZE off the Chesapeake was cool and steady. Though it wasn’t strong enough to move the hammock he was lying in, it still offered a pleasant contrast to the hot sun that managed to make its way through the leaves overhead. September was still hot in the D.C. area. But Jed Calhoun was growing tired of the lazy days of summer—tired of being trapped in limbo. And he was especially tired of being a “dead” man.
Two weeks of living on his friend Ryder’s houseboat had allowed him to finish recovering from the injuries he’d sustained on his last mission, a contract job for the CIA that he’d very nearly not returned from.
Even now, he wasn’t sure why he hadn’t died six months ago in that alley in Bogotá. He’d suffered first a gunshot wound to the shoulder and then the leg. His last conscious thought as he’d faced the CIA agent who’d just shot him in the leg was that he was a goner.
Instead, he’d awakened in a small private hospital where the medical care had been surprisingly good. There was only one small problem. He’d discovered that Jed Calhoun was officially listed as dead, terminated by the agent who’d shot him in the leg. The real kicker was that the orders to take him out had come from the director of the CIA because he, Jed Calhoun, had killed Frank Medici, a career operative with the CIA who’d penetrated a large drug cartel in Colombia.
It was a lie. But he’d been in a bar with Frank and delivered a message to him moments before a bomb had destroyed the entire building.
During the past two weeks, Ryder had called in a few favors from his contacts at CIA headquarters and learned that Jed’s motive for killing Frank Medici had been money. Supposedly someone in the Vidal drug cartel had learned of Frank’s true identity and hired Jed to take him out. Right now there was a million in American dollars in an offshore account in Jed’s name.
The frame was neat and conclusive. He’d been in that bar. He could have planted that bomb. And the money trail led to him. As long as Jed Calhoun remained “dead,” the case was closed. And until Ryder and he could prove that Jed hadn’t killed Frank Medici, he couldn’t rise from the dead.
He was trapped in limbo all right. The one thing he did know was who’d shot him and left him in that alley. Agent Bailey Montgomery, who was currently one of the best data analysts at the CIA. They’d sent a desk jockey to terminate him. That part grated a little, but it had been clever of them to send a woman. It had made him less suspicious when she’d suggested an alley for their meeting. He’d slipped up there, but so had she. He was still alive.
But it wasn’t just his own frustration that was grating on him. He also had a feeling deep in his gut that his time was running out. A week ago he’d helped Ryder out with a case involving Ryder’s fiancé, Sierra Gibbs, and he’d had to appear briefly at a major D.C. party. A lot of the capital’s movers and shakers had been there, including Bailey Montgomery. She might have spotted him. A nagging little hunch told him that she had, and if she had, he had no doubt she’d come after him.
What he needed was just a little something to go on. All it would take was a thread that he could pull on until the whole fabric unraveled. Since Ryder had finished the case involving Sierra, his friend had been working 24/7 to come up with something, but so far Ryder had been drawing blanks.
A short burst of laughter—Sierra’s and Ryder’s—carried clearly to him despite that the hammock was a good three hundred yards from the houseboat and blocked from view by some trees. Jed’s frustration increased.
In the short time that Dr. Sierra Gibbs and Ryder Kane had been together, Jed had found himself envying Ryder. It had been a long time since he’d allowed himself to have a serious relationship with a woman. Doing freelance contract work for various government agencies was not conducive to having a stable love life.
Which was another reason why he was determined to get his life back. Restlessly, Jed shifted again in the hammock.
Another burst of laughter floated to him on the breeze. He missed that sharing of jokes, the after-sex conversations—and hell, he might as well be honest. He missed the sex, too. No doubt that was why he found himself spinning erotic fantasies about Sierra’s mousy little research assistant, Zoë McNamara.
From the time that he’d first laid eyes on her, he hadn’t been able to shake her loose from his mind. At first he’d found that curious because she wasn’t his type. Usually he was drawn to tall, leggy blondes.
Zoë McNamara was the total opposite of that. In terms of appearance, the most he could give her was cute. She was short, barely an inch or so above five feet tall, she had glossy, dark brown hair that she wore pulled back in a ponytail or a braid. He’d never seen her legs because she usually hid them under long skirts. She hid her eyes, too, behind oversize black-framed glasses. Maybe that was why so many of his dreams were fueled by the challenge of getting her out of those ugly clothes and out from behind those nerdy specs.
She was a prickly little thing, too—didn’t like her personal space invaded. Naturally, it had amused him to invade it at every opportunity. But each time he got close to her, he had an urge to get closer still.
A couple of nights ago at Ryder and Sierra’s engagement party, he’d asked her to dance. And he’d kissed her. Or at least that had been his intention when he’d drawn her behind that cluster of potted palms on the patio of the Blue Pepper.
But he hadn’t kissed her, not fully, not the way he wanted to kiss her. Something had made him step away at the last moment. That wasn’t like him. Jed frowned as he thought about it. The last woman who’d made him hesitate like that was Molly Jo Beckworth in third grade. Jed smiled at the memory. Molly Jo had been tall, blond and beautiful, and on his second attempt to kiss her he hadn’t been hesitant at all.
But Zoë McNamara wasn’t his first love—or any kind of love at all.
