"How do you address me?" His fingers never stopped moving, swinging back and forth.
Clenching her slim arms tightly to her chest, Maura looked up at him in appeal. "You are the head of an international corporate powerhouse," she said, carefully omitting the crime syndicate portion. "I write code. If we have - you know, if we - if we're doing-"
"If I'm fucking you into a thousand orgasms, Miss MacLaren? If I'm pleasuring your exquisite body, if I'm sinking my cock into you… is that what you're trying to say?" His fingers still wouldn't stop, pulling a corner of the towel from her clutching fingers, one breast exposed.
"Please don't make me your whore!" Maura's voice was louder than she meant it to be. "You have a hundred of those at your disposal. I don't want to be one of them. Whores don't last in the Corporation!"
He looked so angry that she tried to step away from him before realizing James had been edging her backward, pinning her against the back of the couch. "That's what you think, then? Being with me makes you a whore?"
"It's what everyone else will think," she managed, thinking of her senior agents. James pushed her onto the couch, pulling her towel away at the same time. Maura gasped as he suddenly covered her naked body with his suited one.
***
"You think this makes you a target, that your coworkers will think you're fucking your boss for job security. For more money?” James stood suddenly, watching her cringe as she reached for her towel. “Do you think I would allow that?”
Maura ran her hand through her hair with a sigh. He knew she was exhausted, and apparently, out of arguments.
James buttoned his suit jacket, eyeing her still. “Get some sleep. You’ll need it.” He turned and left quickly before the sight of all that lovely, bare skin made him lose his resolve.
It took driving home and pulling into his parking space before he stopped grinding his teeth, something James thought he’d conquered years ago. "If I were a good man,” he said to his reflection in the rearview mirror, “I would let you go, darling. But I can't. I'm not a good man. But I'll protect you from everything. Everything but me."
Chapter 7: I Hate You. I Don't Care
In which Maura learns avoidance isn't a good tactic when James wants something.
While Maura had been to Nicholas’s ridiculously cluttered apartment many times, she'd never invited him to her houseboat. He had taken this somewhat personally and constantly pointed out the disparity in hospitality, which she usually ignored. But she found herself grudgingly issuing the invitation the following week - mainly to shut him up - but also with the thought that James wouldn't stop by unannounced if he knew Nicholas was there.
And James always knew.
Even for someone whose career was surveillance, Maura could never figure out how he always knew where she was, as if she'd left him a note on his desk, or a text letting him know she'd be out. Even after scanning everything from her phone to her car for a tracking system, Maura never found a thing. No tails that she could spot. Nothing. But James still showed up as he liked, knowing when she'd be alone.
Leaning back on her counter, Maura watched Nicholas poke around the houseboat, pushing up his glasses as he picked things up and put them down again. Her lab buddy was invariably tactile - he learned best by handling things, looking them over, and seeing how they worked. Much like a toddler, which is why she'd developed a somewhat maternal streak when it came to her bespectacled partner.
"It's so cool," he beamed, "all these little cubbies and hidden spaces." Maura handed him a beer and walked out to the deck, leaning back in her comfortable chair with her feet on the railing. They clinked bottles together in a cheerful toast, enjoying the sunshine that somehow forced a way through the clouds that day.
"Don't you get lonely here, all on your own?"
Nicholas had four cats patrolling his apartment and neighbors who dropped by at all hours. Maura occasionally worried that his open-door policy would compromise his position at work until she realized he simply kept all his calculations in his gifted brain until he entered the doors of the Corporation the next day.
"No," she moved her feet a little on the railing, "it's a small marina, but there are some other live-aboards here. We look after each other." He knew better than to ask about family. When he'd first broached the subject over "getting to know you" beers after her first week at the Corporation, Maura looked at him levelly. "I don't have any. And I don't want to discuss it."
He pondered the label on his beer bottle. "Still, you need someone to greet you when you get home."
Maura rolled her eyes. "After some of the days we've had? Good lord, Nicholas! All I want to do is curl up in the fetal position." She wasn't joking, the two had been called into the Boardroom twice that week, dodging pens, drinking glasses, anything that came to Kingston's hand. They'd spent countless hours running scans, trying to see if anything else had been accessed by the operative who committed "suicide" before the Big Three had their way with him. Because he wasn’t one of theirs, Maura had no way of knowing what he could have accessed, so she was just as frustrated with the scans as he was. "Surely the Corporation has had security breaches before..."
He shook his head, finishing his beer, looking hopefully at her bottle. "Nothing of this magnitude. Never someone in the inner circle," Maura sighed, handing over her beer and watching him take a happy swig. "Haven't you noticed that we're getting more and more scrutiny from MI6 and the U.S. Treasury Department?"
Raising her eyebrows innocently, Maura shrugged. "I guess I haven't been here long enough to see a pattern yet."
Shoving his glasses up again, Nicholas gave an irritated huff. "It wasn't so bad, really when Jaguar Holdings was selling gu- ah, doing the earlier business model. But with our move into finance, now they care. Honestly! It's not like half the governments in Europe aren't doing this. They're just pissed off we're cutting into their take."
Getting up and grabbing another two beers, Maura laughed. "Well, the IRS agents finally caught Al Capone on tax fraud charges, rather than the murder and bootlegging and such."
"Oh, god can you imagine it-" groaned Nicholas. "The mighty Big Three brought down by The Internal Revenue Service.” He shuddered. "They'd blow up half of Manhattan before they'd let that happen."
She stiffened. "What? I thought they didn't sell gu- that they no longer practiced the former business model."
Perhaps if he hadn't consumed three beers in short order, perhaps if he hadn't felt so comfortable, sitting in the sun and talking with who he felt was his best friend, he would have been more discreet. Unfortunately, he chuckled. "You have no idea, MacLaren. They're sitting on enough firepower to take over a small country." Nicholas changed the subject, happily discussing a new computer virus he'd created to toy with Amazon.com while Maura sat frozen in shock.
