Satisfaction Guaranteed

Chapter 2

Ethan saved what he was working on and closed down his computer system, his movement precise and controlled. Frustrations rode him hard though.

He’d come back from his last assignment with a name. Arthur Prescott. An information broker and the man responsible for the deaths of two foreign agents Ethan had considered his friends. The information broker was American and working out of a small town on the Oregon coast. His home was like a fortress overlooking the ocean, but he managed to keep his thumb on the pulse of high-tech discoveries nationwide.

That wasn’t so surprising, considering many of the nation’s top minds in the computer industry could be found in Oregon, Washington, and California. But the man did not limit himself to brokering deals on pirated computer technology. He had his fingers in pies all over the country and Ethan was determined to see that those fingers got burned. Badly.

But he couldn’t find any way into the bastard’s house or network of contacts. External attempts to crack Prescott’s computer system by TGP’s best hackers had proven fruitless, and for a rich man, the guy hired few employees, even domestics. There should be openings in his organization. There always were with men like this, but nothing was showing up. An-where.

Prescott was one careful SOB, but Ethan was determined to find a way in and when he did, he was going to shut the man’s operation down. Completely. Ethan had no tolerance for people with no loyalty but to their own desires. Even mobsters could be patriotic but not this guy. He was in it for Number One and to hell with his own country and everyone else in it.

He wasn’t even a spy for the opposition. Hell no, he sold information to anyone with enough money to pay for it. Prescott showed no favoritism and he had few friends, but then men like him rarely did. He didn’t have a lot of enemies either, though. He was a broker and the people who bought his information knew that he brokered deals with their enemies and they didn’t care. There weren’t a lot of scruples in the world of espionage.

And this man had even fewer than most. Ethan was damn sure he was responsible for the deaths of more than just the foreign agents. Which gave him all the more reason to want to take Prescott down, but for right now he was hitting one brick wall after another.

Time to go home and let his subconscious work on it while he focused on something else. Maybe he could set up a jump. Isaac had said he wanted to go skydiving. Maybe they could even invite the new guy. Get to know him a little better, find out how much metal he was made of.

Ethan finished buttoning up his office before he stepped into the corridor.

Beth was still at her desk, her curly brown hair falling out of its clip, her lower lip caught between her teeth while she closed her system down. Her movements were hurried and her expression almost furtive.

“Got a hot date tonight?” he asked as he reached her. The possibility that she was going out with the new agent dispelled all thoughts about his current case from Ethan’s mind more effectively than if he’d taken a bungee leap into a three-hundred-foot ravine.

Her slender shoulders jerked like he’d surprised her and she looked up, her soft brown eyes not focusing on him immediately. It was the kind of look a woman gave a man after they’d made love and she was still off in the never-never land of satisfaction. His gut tightened with something he’d worked very hard to sublimate for going on two years.

It shouldn’t be so difficult. She was not his type. He went for sophisticated and usually glamorous…the type of woman who knew the score and didn’t mind the tally.

With doe-brown eyes that sparkled behind glasses she was forever fiddling with, gentle features, and a figure that landed somewhere between Uma Thurman thin and Mae West curves, Beth looked and acted more like the girl next door. She was friendly and warm to everybody, a little stubborn, and a lot innocent. She was the kind of woman who expected marriage and a white picket fence on the other side of hot and sweaty sex, if she imagined getting down and dirty like that at all.

He gave an internal shudder at the thought. Of the marriage…not the sex. His gut told him sex with her would be mind blowing, which made no sense. But he couldn’t shake the feeling. Nevertheless, he wasn’t even sort of ready to start settling down. Free climbing a sheer rock face didn’t make him break out in a sweat, but the idea of getting married would have him breaking out in hives all over if he let it take root.

Beth was a committed kind of woman and he was a no-commitments-but-his-job kind of man.

She was also the boss’s daughter and Whit could be a mean son when riled. He might be out of the field, but he still maintained an aura of hardness an agent of his caliber never really lost. Beth’s refusal to date agents was a well-established fact as well, but that didn’t stop Ethan’s libido from surging in her presence. It was getting damn annoying…not to mention physically uncomfortable.

She had this way of looking incredibly innocent and enticingly sexy at the same time. All the internal reminders in the world that she was not an Ethan Crane type of woman were about as helpful as a taser against an automatic weapon.

“Oh, it’s you.” She adjusted her glasses and made an obvious effort to focus on him. “Hi, Ethan. No hot date…just dinner with my folks.”

If he knew the old man, dinner wasn’t for another couple of hours. “You’re leaving early tonight.”

She sent a furtive glance to the corridor behind him. “Quitting time is five o’clock.”

Was she hoping Hyatt was going to show?

“Not for you. Not usually.” He’d teased her about it a few times, saying she couldn’t have much of a social life if she spent all of her time at work.

She’d always replied that there was plenty of time for socializing after seven o’clock. His lips quirked now at the memory. That was one of the things he liked about her. She might not be sexy in the conventional way. She didn’t exude confidence like a lot of the female agents, or even what he might expect for the daughter of the old man and his politically well-connected wife, but Beth always gave as good as she got.

And watching her with her dad was like seeing two peas in a pod, though he didn’t think either one of them noticed the resemblance.

“Even I like to get home on time once in a while.” She was grabbing her purse and locking her desk as she spoke. As if she was in a real hurry to leave.

Like he’d told her earlier, the one bane of his existence was his curiosity and this woman, as much as she was so not his type, sparked more curiosity in him than most. She was too private. Which he should understand, being the same way…but it made him want to peel away the layers.

He’d refrained up to now because he knew it was dangerous to get to know her better. With some women, familiarity bred contempt, but he had a feeling that learning more about Beth would just lure him in further. It didn’t make a lick of sense, but then hormones and the male psyche rarely did.

Hadn’t his mother and older sister always said so?

He leaned against her desk, blocking her exit. “You meeting someone before dinner?”

She stared at him like she couldn’t comprehend what he was asking. Then, her dark eyes narrowed. “I am not, not unless you count my two new kittens.” She bit her lip, frowning. “But if I were, that would not be any of your business.”

He shrugged.

“Do I ask you about your personal life?”

“You don’t need to. You have access to my voicemail and e-mail and take a lot of my messages.” She probably knew more about his social life than he did.

“That is not the point. The point is, I’m not nosy and I don’t ask. I would appreciate the same level of courtesy.”

“I wouldn’t mind if you asked.”

“That’s not the…” Her voice trailed off when she realized she was repeating herself and she glared at him like it was his fault. “Well, I do mind. Can we just leave it at that?”

“You sure are prickly for a woman who doesn’t have plans later.”

She made a sound like steam escaping a safety valve. “I am not prickly.”

“Of course not. In fact, she’s rather sweet,” Hyatt said from behind Ethan.

Beth tensed and the glare she’d been giving Ethan turned hotter than molten metal. Curiouser and curiouser.

He turned slowly to face the newcomer, making it possible for Beth to come out from behind her desk. “Is she?”

Hyatt smiled toward Beth. “Yes.”

“You would know?”

“Yes.”

Now why that one bitty word should rub Ethan so wrong, he didn’t know. But it did. It also increased his already dangerous level of interest in Beth’s secrets to extreme risk levels. Which was probably why he found her so interesting. He liked risk. Thrived on it.

Yes, that made sense.

“Past history is not something we are going to discuss,” Beth said with an expression that was no doubt meant to intimidate, but in Ethan’s mind made her cute as hell.

She was too darn innocent and free from violence to truly intimidate a man who was neither.

“We aren’t?” he asked mildly.

But she looked at Hyatt, not him, her dark eyes flashing a warning, before answering. “No, we are not.”

“No, we are not,” Hyatt parroted with an irritating smile.

“At all or ever,” she emphasized, “with this annoyance that calls himself an agent.”

Didn’t she realize the more she fought him knowing what she sought to hide the more his predator’s instincts would be aroused? She spent enough time around agents that she should realize they weren’t tame or easily led.

Hyatt measured Ethan up and down and then nodded. “Our past is a closed book as far as he’s concerned.”

“As far as anyone is concerned.”

Hyatt merely shrugged and if Beth missed the significance of that, Ethan didn’t. The other man wasn’t about to drop the issue of their shared past and that made Ethan even more determined to find out what it was.

Beth grimaced, but nodded. “I’m off.”

“I’ll walk you to your car.” Hyatt smiled, his expression reminding Ethan of a saying his grandmother used to utter.

The man looked as happy as a donkey eating saw briars and Ethan just naturally resisted letting another man be that smug in his presence. “I’m leaving, too; may as well walk with you both.”

Beth walked out of the building flanked by two of the sexiest and most dangerous men she’d ever known. For a woman who did not exactly command legions of male admirers, it was a heady if strange sensation. And being seriously annoyed with both of them did not diminish that feeling one iota.

She thought she might know what was motivating Alan, despite his agreement to be nothing more than friends, but she didn’t get Ethan at all. She knew he had a bone-deep curiosity that made him a really good agent because he was so observant, but why be curious about her?

Her past held pain and embarrassment for her, but certainly nothing that would or could interest a man like Ethan.

He was the one who opened her car door for her, though, after she pressed the unlock button. The look he gave a clearly disgruntled Alan was pure one-upmanship and she couldn’t help laughing. She wasn’t exactly either of their types.

Despite the fact that Alan had once claimed to love her, Beth had long since figured out her main attraction for him had been the fact that she was so serene and cozily domestic. He liked the contrast of coming home to her to the high-adrenaline life in the field as an agent. He’d even said as much once and she had been foolish enough to think that meant he was getting ready to truly settle down. That maybe the stress of fieldwork had started to get to him.

She’d been spectacularly wrong and his signing on with TGP proved it.

But both men were acting like a couple of alpha wolves marking territory. She supposed that was only natural when a new agent came on staff, for him to settle his boundaries, but she’d never had one use her to do it with before. And she found the whole experience downright hilarious.

“When she laughs like that, you can’t help feeling she’s laughing at you, not with you,” Alan said with resignation.

Ethan’s left brow rose in a gesture she’d never been able to perfect. “Are you laughing at us, Beth?”

She grinned, tugging on her door. “Yes.”

“Why is that, I wonder?”

“Why are you holding my door?” she countered.

“I’d say that was obvious. I’m not ready for you to leave yet.”

“I’d say why I’m laughing is obvious, too.”

“Maybe you’d better explain it anyway. I’m just a simple Texas boy. We don’t always get the subtle nuances in a situation,” he drawled, his accent exaggerated.

If anything, her mirth doubled. The man was as far from simple as an expert-level Sudoku puzzle. “There’s nothing simple about you, Agent Crane, which is why I’m sure you’ll get the concept that if you don’t let go of my door, important messages might start getting mislaid. Messages from friends wanting to go skydiving, women hoping to see you again…that sort of thing.”

“Never piss off the secretary,” Alan intoned with mock solemnity.

“Central Administrative Agent,” Ethan corrected, looking far from worried.

Beth tugged on her door again, but it didn’t move. She gave Ethan a pointed glance.

“Tell me why you are laughing at us.”

She shook her head at him, humor tinged with exasperation. “You’re both so intent on marking territory, you haven’t even stopped to consider that neither of you wants the thing you’re working so hard to pee a circle around.”

“Are you sure about that?” Ethan asked.

Her heart skipped a beat at the implication of his words before reason kicked in. She could so not afford to let her imagination go there. Alan was going through some sort of nostalgic feelings for her and apparently Ethan, swift observer that he was, had latched onto that fact. Like men the world over, he was getting entirely too much enjoyment out of pulling the other man’s chain.

It was just another way to razz the new recruit.

“I’m sure I want to leave,” she said in answer to his taunt. “I’ve got two kittens that are going to destroy another set of draperies I spent months trying to find if I don’t get home and feed them soon.”

He smiled at that. “Then I had better let you go. Drive safely, Beth.”

“I always do.”

“See you tomorrow,” Alan added as Ethan gently closed her door for her and knocked on her window in salute.

Beth arrived at her parents’ home bare minutes before she was supposed to sit down to dinner with them.

Mozart and Beethoven had knocked over one of her Chinese planter pots and she’d had that mess to clean up, two rambunctious kittens to scold, and then she’d had to change into an outfit her mother would approve of for dinner at home. Her work gear wouldn’t cut it.

Mother expected her to look feminine after office hours. Even for a simple family dinner. Though, as Beth had expected, it was not a private family dinner. They rarely were. Though this once-a-week ritual was something her mother had instituted when Beth had moved into her own condo, there was no attempt to make it a cozy night of domesticity.

That was Beth’s tendency…it had never been either of her parents’. Tonight, they were also entertaining a senator’s aide and his new fiancée.

“I knew you wouldn’t mind me inviting them to join us for dinner to celebrate the engagement,” Lynn Whitney said with a charming smile that had done more for her than most lobbyists’ arguments when influencing politicians.

Beth returned it. “Of course not.”

But spending the evening discussing wedding plans after coming face-to-face with her own spectacular failure in that regard was not Beth’s recipe for a relaxing evening.

And when her mother went so far as to give advice based on her own experience with Beth’s “unfortunately aborted” wedding, Beth’s patience ran out.

“You’ll never guess who is working for Dad now,” she said with a smile that would have done a crocodile proud.

“Who, dear?” her mother asked while her father went rigid in his chair.

Ah, so Mother hadn’t known? Somehow, she’d suspected that.

“Alan Hyatt and he hasn’t changed a bit. You could have turned the clock back three years and not even noticed the difference.” Except that three years ago she’d been planning to marry him and now she was simply doing her best to deal with the revelation of having to work with him.

Her mother’s eyes actually widened in shock while her mouth formed a perfect O of astonishment. “I thought he worked for the FBI.”

“He did, but apparently Dad convinced him to take a chance on the State Department.”

“You hired the man who stood your daughter up at the altar?” her mother demanded, for once her political mask stripped completely away.

“I hired a man who is very good at his job, Lynn. It’s been three years.”

“He stood you up at the altar?” the senator’s aide’s fiancée asked, her own eyes glittering with interest.

“Yes.”

“You mean he just never showed?” the other young woman asked, agog.

“Never showed. Didn’t call to explain why until three days later. By then I had already returned most of the wedding gifts. I’m very efficient.”

“And he’s still alive?” the senator’s aide asked with a laugh.

“I practice a policy of nonaggression,” Beth said, tongue in cheek.

“And you hired him?” the fiancée asked of Whit, her expression filled with appalled fascination.

“Yes.”

Sensing that her small dinner party was traveling into dangerous waters, Beth’s mother pulled herself together and changed the subject to one that had not a thing to do with weddings or jilted brides. And Beth breathed in relief.

After dinner, she managed to get her father alone briefly and demanded, “So, why didn’t you warn me? It’s pretty obvious you didn’t tell Mom either.”

“I have never shared my work with your mother. And you know that we don’t make the names of new agents known to other staff until all paperwork has been signed,” he said, making no pretense of not understanding exactly what Beth was talking about.

“I’m not other employees, I’m your daughter.” Was it everyone in D.C., or just her parents who didn’t understand the meaning of family loyalty? “You didn’t even tell me we were getting a new recruit until this morning.”

Unfortunately, she thought her parents fit the D.C. climate better than she did. There were a lot of politicians who talked great rhetoric about family values while spending almost no time with their own. Her mother worked with many of them and admired them, too. Sometimes Beth felt like she’d been born into the wrong world, but wasn’t sure how to find another one to inhabit.

Were things different anywhere else?

“And you expected me to bend rules for you?”

“In this instance? Yes, I darn well did. The man stood me up at the altar. I had a right to know I was going to be working with him. That I would see him today.”

“He had his reasons.”

That wasn’t the point, but she didn’t expect her dad to get that. “So he said.”

“And you refused to accept his explanation. So be it, but do not expect me to choose my agents based on personal considerations because that’s not the way I work.” It was the old party line for him…work came first, last, and always.

She didn’t even try to argue that point.

“I didn’t say anything about choosing your agents. I’m talking about the warning you owed me as your daughter that I would be in a potentially upsetting situation today.”

“You told me you were over him. Were you upset?”

“I am over him, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t startling and a little upsetting to come face-to-face with the man who jilted me at the altar.”

Her dad’s gaze was calculating. “You felt nothing for him?”

“If you brought him to work for you in an attempt at matchmaking, I guarantee you are going to be disappointed.”

Something shifted in his expression. “I told you I don’t make work choices based on personal considerations.”

“That I believe.”

Whit sighed. “I thought bringing you to work for me would help you to see why I made the choices I did when you were growing up.”

“I always knew why. And that’s not the issue here. You were wrong not to warn me you’d hired Alan. I’m your daughter and I deserved that little bit of consideration.”

“He’s a good agent. I like him. I always did,” he said, once again skirting the real issue and focusing in on the job. “He can be relied on.”

“He proved that without a shadow of a doubt on what would have been our wedding day, didn’t he? Nothing, not even getting married, could get in the way of an assignment.”

“You might not admire that kind of dedication, but I do.”

“I know you do.”

“And you never have.”

“You’re wrong. I do admire it, I just don’t think it mixes with family.”

“Your mother did.”

“Yes. You two were well matched.”

“You’re our daughter.”

“Are you absolutely sure I wasn’t switched at birth?” she joked.

Instead of laughing, her dad looked pained. “Elizabeth…”

She sighed. “Just kidding, Dad. Look, believe it or not, I didn’t intend to rehash old arguments.”

“You’re angry with me for not warning you of Alan’s arrival,” he said on a sigh, finally acknowledging the real issue.

“I always said you were a smart man.”

“I didn’t think giving you advance warning would improve the situation.” Which was the truth, Whit thought.

He’d wanted his daughter’s raw reaction to Alan to increase the probability factor of his own plans working out.

He’d lied when he said he never let his personal life impinge on his work decisions. This time, he was in up to his eyeballs on a personal basis. If Alan weren’t an exemplary agent, it wouldn’t have worked, but he was and Whit had no reason to doubt his choice.

His daughter had been running scared for too long. For a woman who wanted family more than he’d ever wanted the glory of thwarting enemies of his government, she was way too dedicated to her job. It was time she settled down.

He and Lynn wanted grandchildren. They’d talked about it, but they were never going to get them if Elizabeth expended all her maternal energy on those two kittens she’d just adopted when she’d started feeling like the condo was too empty. Why hadn’t she thought of bringing another person into her home?

Lynn thought she was gun-shy about relationships and marriage. He agreed, but he wasn’t willing to take his wife’s approach of letting Time be the great healer. Trying to fix her up with eligible men didn’t work either. His daughter was extremely strong minded when it came to some things and dating was one of them.

But Elizabeth had had three long years and instead of opening up, she’d grown more wary. Less willing to accommodate another person in her life.

She worked atrocious hours, but she dismissed his warnings in that regard as a joke. She could not take seriously that he of all people would really be telling her that she was too wrapped up in her job. But that was exactly what he thought.

His absentee parenting and Lynn’s focus on her political causes instead of Elizabeth’s emotional welfare had taken a toll neither of them had seen until too late. Then the wedding fiasco had happened with Alan Hyatt and Elizabeth had withdrawn completely from the risk of any sort of relationships.

She had few friends and held her coworkers at TGP at a distance so she didn’t make any more. He didn’t know what made his daughter tick, but she was his only child and he loved her, even if she’d never accept how much.

But he had a plan to show her and that plan included getting himself some grandchildren. He’d always been one hell of a tactician and his daughter didn’t know it, but she was his most important case.

He couldn’t wait to see the look on her face when he instituted Step Two in the Plan.