“Youdidhave a crush!Dohave?” He propped one elbow on the bed beside her legs, his eyes drilling into hers, and she tried her very best to keep her breathing regular.
“Can we please get back to figuring out how to get the FBI and the CIA and the Russians and whoever else off our backs?”
He shrugged, turning back to the book. “We can try. Gonna be hard for me to forget that you have a crush on me.”
“Notyou. Holt. And this isn’t you being arrogant…?”
“I don’t need to fish for compliments, remember? They jump right onto my hook.”
“You’re, you’re…”
“The kind of guy you couldn’t get out of your system, once he was in it. Was that the line you were looking for? Or was it:His presence changed the very air in the room—it was heavier, charged with a palpable current.”
She playfully whacked him on the head. Goddamn his photographic memory. He reflexively grabbed her wrist and pulled her down, laughing. She unbalanced and tipped over, catching herself with her free arm a split second before they knocked heads. They stilled with their lips an inch apart. A moment of doubt crossed his face. She recognized it as the look Nika had narrated, before he kissed her.I caught a flash of … something … and then he rubbed his lips together, his gaze drifting to her mouth.
“Time to get to work,” Alice said, disentangling herself, “and then you can go back into the pages of the book, where you belong. A genie banished to its bottle.”
He laughed, long and heartily, and there was something gratifying about that, even if she suspected it was mostly at her expense. At least it broke the sexual tension, which was surely all one-sided. Though that look he’d just given her…
“Anderson Holt rarely laughed,” she said, sitting cross-legged. “He was the strong, silent type andthatwas his appeal,” she said, raising her volume to compete with his laughter. “Very unmanly.” She bit back a smile. To be fair, the image she had of him as taciturn was literally fictitious. As far as she knew, he might be a regularSesame StreetErnie when he wasn’t running for his life. “Task at hand, Holt. I mean Beck. Ugh.”
He sighed, recovering, and resumed scrolling through the story. “Do you ever get that thing sometimes, when you laugh—properly laugh—and you realize it’s been a mighty long time since you last did that?”
“I do. I really do.”
She had a sudden urge to crawl down the bed behind him, push her palms down his shoulders and onto his chest, and kiss the side of his neck. She would never, of course, but she got enough of a thrill from simply imagining what his chest and sweater would feel like under her hands, how his skin would taste. Her mother and sisters would insist she go ahead and do it, with an exasperated group eye roll. For years they’d told her, as each had faced their mortality, that she needed to live twice as hard on their behalf, but she suspected it was easier to give advice that you should live like there’s no tomorrow when there was no tomorrow. And hey, no one truly learned from other people’s experiences, right? The downfall of humankind since forever. For Alice, the tomorrows would continue on into yesterdays, full of consequences, regrets, rejection, guilt… Shewould tiptoe on through life, same as she always had, which she would probably rue the moment she was diagnosed, if that day came. Maybe that was when the fearlessness would come. There was nothing like hanging out with international spies—not that she’d known that about Nika at the time—to make you realize how sedate and inconsequential your life was, like the way looking up at a starry sky made you feel tiny.
“You’re staring at me,” Carter said. “I can feel it on the back of my head.”
“You’re rightthere. It’s hard not to stare at someone in a room this small. It’s you or the wall.”
“I could hear you thinking. About how alluring I am?”
“I really wasn’t.”
“Then what?” The side of his face bunched into a grin. It sounded almost like a challenge. Or … an invitation?
She shook her head, her mouth suddenly dry. “Nothing.”
“No, go on.”
“I just … can’t help thinking that life should be more than a series of days in which you wake up, do some things and go to sleep again without having achieved anything of consequence.”
His smile dropped, and he looked up at her. “That’swhere you were?”
“More or less. Sorry to disappoint you. Like I say, I’m very ordinary.”
“Huh. You know, that’s kinda what I was thinking about my life until a few days ago—totally dull, doing nothing of consequence, well, for no one but the cheating spouses and thieving employees I was collecting intel on. Collectingdirton—let’s not be grandiose about it. Of course, that was before you went and pinned a murder on me—two, if you count Vanessa. You sure know how to liven up a guy’s life.”
“You’re not going to let that slide, are you?” she said, in faux exasperation.
“Oh, it’s not the only thing I’m not gonna let slide, Ms. Thornton. Time we made our evening more memorable.” He reached for her. Shit, it really looked like hewasgoing to make a move—grab her hand, coax her down, thread his fingers through her hair as he swiveled onto his knees before her, cradle her neck while he leaned in to kiss her, push her onto her back on the bed… But his hand stretched right on past her and grabbed the dictaphone from the bedside table. “Nine hours of listening to a dead Russian woman talk crazy should do it,” he said, grinning. Yep, he knew exactly where Alice’s mind had been going. Hell, he’d led her there, the lowlife. Nika hadn’t been kidding about hisallure.
“That’s what we’re here for, after all,” she said. Which was one hundred percent a reminder to herself.
Chapter 15
Carter
