perfect mutation for a paranoid guy like him. Knowledge was power, and power was good. He'd built a lucrative career on that philosophy. Jesse used to tease him about it.
He shoved that thought away fast, before it could bite him.
He had to stay cool and detached. Cyborg man. It was a name for a comic book superhero. He'd always liked those mutant guys in the classic comic books. They were all tormented, depressed and alienated. He could relate to that. He'd watched Montserrat, Lazar's former mistress, with ice-cold detachment Watching her writhe in bed with Lazar had left him unmoved, even a little repulsed. Never once had he felt guilty.
But then again, Montserrat was a professional. He could read it in her sinuous, calculated body language. She wore a mask all the time, when she was fucking Lazar; even when she was alone.
The blonde had no mask at all. She was wide open and defenseless and soft, like whipped cream, like butter, like silk.
It made him feel sleazy for watching her, an emotion so unfamiliar that it had taken him days to put a name to it The hell of it was, the sleazier he felt, the more impossible it was to stop. He wished he could shake off the nagging sense that she needed to be rescued. He wasn't the white knight type to begin with, and besides, he had Jesse to avenge. That was enough responsibility.
And he wished she weren't so fucking beautiful. It was disturbing.
A shrink could probably explain his fixation: he was projecting deprived childhood fantasies onto her because she looked like a fairy-tale princess. He'd read too many comic books as a kid. He was stressed, depressed, obsessed, had an altered perception of reality, blah, blah, blah. Then that woman's stunning body had altered reality beyond recognition. It had shocked his numbed libido violently to life.
She drifted wearily into the range of the color-cam nestled inside the carved ebony filigree of a hanging lamp in the bedroom. The lamp had been left behind by Montserrat, who had departed so abruptly that she hadn't even taken the time to pack the personal items that she had contributed to the house's decor. The blonde had brought nothing of her own to the house, and had shown no interest in moving the pieces already in place, which was good. The lamp color-cam commanded an excellent view of the mirror on the armoire, a detail for which he had reason to be grateful. He enlarged the image until it filled the whole screen, ignoring a slight pang of guilt. This was his favorite part, and he wasn't missing it for anything.
She removed her jacket, clipped the skirt to the hanger. With the awe-inspiring resolution of the latest generation of Colby color-cams, he could differentiate every gradation of the color of her perfect skin, from cream to pink to rose to crimson. More than worth the extra bandwidth the signal occupied. She hung up the suit, and the tail of her blouse hiked up to reveal prim cotton briefs stretched tightly across the swell of her rounded ass. He knew her routine like it was the opening credits of an old television show, and still he hung on every detail. Her unself- consciousness fascinated him. Most of the good-looking women he knew played constantly to an imaginary camera. They checked every reflective surface they passed to make sure they were still beautiful. This dreamy-eyed girl didn't seem to particularly notice, or care.
She peeled off her hose, flung them into the corner, and started her clumsy, innocent nightly striptease. She rumbled with her cuffs until he wanted to scream at her to get the fuck on with it. Then she fussed and picked at the buttons at the throat of the high-collared blouse, gazing into the mirror as if she saw another world entirely.
His breath hissed in between his teeth when she finally shrugged off the blouse. Her plump breasts were sternly restrained by a white underwire bra. It was not a sexy, rich-man's-plaything scrap of lingerie. It had plain, wide straps, was practical and unadorned—and the feint hint of cleavage it revealed was the sexiest thing he'd ever seen.
She sniffed delicately at the armpits of the blouse, which brought a grim smile to his face. It was hard to imagine that graceful, marble-white body actually sweating, though he bet he could drive her to it. She would break a sweat once she were spread out naked beneath his pounding body, her hips jerking eagerly up to meet his thrusts. Or astride him, those big, soft tits bouncing, filling his hands as he drove into her from below. He would make that ivory skin flush wild-rose pink, until tangled curls clung to her cheek, her throat. He would make her soaking wet. Every hot, sweet, slippery inch of her.
He rearranged his throbbing private parts inside his jeans and dragged his hand over his hot face with a groan. He had no business getting anything more than a purely casual, incidental hard-on for one of Lazar's toys. It was deadly stupid, and it had to stop.
Except that now it was time for the hair. God, he loved that part.
She tossed pin after pin into the china tray on the dresser, and uncoiled the thick blond braid from the bun at the nape of her neck. She unraveled the strands, shaking them loose until they rippled past the small of her back, tapering down to gleaming wisps that brushed tenderly against the round curve of her ass. His breath sighed out in a low, audible groan as she reached behind herself and unhooked the bra. His hands tingled as he stared at her plump, luscious breasts, crowned with pale pink nipples. He imagined them taut, flushed and hard against his fingers, the palms of his hands, his feverish face, his hungry, suckling mouth.
His heart began to pound as she peeled off me panties, rolling her shoulders, her neck, arching her back, enjoying the sensual freedom of being naked and alone. Unmasked. Whipped cream and butter and silk.
The downy puff of springy blond curls at her crotch didn't quite hide the shadowy cleft between her shapely thighs. He wanted to press his face against those ringlets, inhale her warm, woman scent, and men taste her, parting the tender pinkfolds of her cunt, licking and suckling until she collapsed in pleasure. Video and audio were not enough. He needed more data. Textures, smells, tastes. He was starving for it.
And then, the gesture that always undid him. She bent from the waist and flung her hair over her head, arching her back and running her fingers through the wavy mass. The placement of the camera and the mirror guaranteed him a spectacular view of her soft, rounded thighs, the creamy globes of her ass, the enticing divide between them.
The sight was enough to wake the dead.
Jesse. The stab of pain blindsided him.
He turned away from the monitor and forced himself to breathe over the burning ache. Don't cave in, he reminded himself. He couldn't let grief dull his edge. On the contrary, he would use it to sharpen his resolve. To turn him into a single-minded, utterly dedicated instrument of ruin. He averted his eyes, punishing himself by missing the rest of the stretch show. He'd gotten very skilled at shoving away painful thoughts and memories before they could dig in their fangs, but the blonde blew his focus all to hell. He forced himself to run over his reason for existence: to watch that treacherous bastard Lazar until he made contact with Novak. And then, open season. Payback time.
By the time he permitted himself to look back at the screen, the blonde had clothed herself in a baggy fleece sweat suit, and was logging onto her computer. He scooted over to another bank of computers and monitors, activating the hidden antenna he had planted to pick up her computer's EM frequency noise. He ran it through the DPS hardware that deciphered and reconstructed what was on her screen, and monitored her message. It was to a Juan Carlos in Barcelona. She sent messages in half a dozen different languages, but this one was in Spanish, which he understood from growing up in the ghettos of L.A. It was innocuous enough:
He was toying with the idea of doing a background check on the guy when a cool draft whispered across his neck. He snatched the SIG Sauer P22B that lay on the desk and spun around.
It was Connor McCloud, co-conspirator and all-around pain in the ass, who had been Jesse's best buddy and partner in the undercover FBI task force that Jesse had dubbed “the Cave.” No wonder the alarm hadn't tripped. He'd bypassed it the sneaky son-of-a-bitch. The guy moved like a ghost, despite his limp and his cane,Seth lay the gun down, breath escaping slowly from his lungs. “Don't sneak up on me, McCloud. It could get you killed.”
Connor’s sharp green eyes swept the room, taking in every detail. “Hey, man. Stay casual. I brought you some coffee, but I'm thinking now that maybe you shouldn't drink it”
Seth saw the dingy room through Connor's eyes for a moment, the clutter of beer bottles and take-out containers scattered across dusty snarls of cables and electronic equipment The apartment was getting more squalid by the day, and it wasn't smelling too good, either.
But what the fuck did he care? It was just a parking spot He grabbed the coffee, popped the lid and took a
