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Two Hot! Chapter One | page 1 | page 2 | page 3 | excerpts
I want Jed Calhoun. Zoë McNamara drew her bottom lip between her teeth and studied the words she’d just written on the first page of a fresh notebook. From the time she’d been a very young girl, she’d developed a habit of writing down her thoughts and feelings. Doing so had always helped her keep her focus and work through problems. Jed Calhoun definitely qualified as a problem. She’d only known the man for two weeks, yet he could scramble her nerves with nothing more than one of those mocking looks of his. And when he touched her even in the most casual of ways, the brush of his arm against hers as they entered a doorway, he sent her pulse rocketing. Then there was the kiss. Frowning, Zoë tapped her pen against the edge of the page. It hadn’t been a kiss at all, not really, but it had stirred up feelings she hadn’t acted on in a very long time. The problem was Jed Calhoun made her want to act on them. Ever since that “almost” kiss, he’d haunted her dreams, waking and sleeping. He was even beginning to interfere with her work. All she thought about was what it might have been like if he’d really kissed her. Zoë badly wanted to pick up the note book and throw it at the wall of her office. Better still, she wanted to go after Jed Calhoun and demand that he finish what he’d started. But she’d learned that giving into what her parents referred to as the “wilder” side of her nature, especially with men, never solved a thing. She’d been there, done that her freshman year in college, and she’d learned her lesson. Hadn’t she? When the phone rang, Zoë jumped. A glance at the caller ID had her stomach knotting. It was her mother, no doubt wanting a progress report on her work. She let the call transfer to her voice mail, then rising, she circled her desk and began to pace on the small Oriental rug. Lately, her parents had been pleased with her. She was a PhD candidate in Psychology at Georgetown University. The current research she was doing with Dr. Sierra Gibbs on the dating and sexual practices of urban singles would be published, and that together with her degree would ensure her the kind of academic career that they were confidant would be right for her. Genetically, she was very suited to the kind of work she was doing with Sierra Gibbs. Her father, Dr. Michael McNamara, held a chair in theoretical physics at Harvard, and her mother, Dr. Miranda Phelps, was the Dean of the Engineering School at Stanford. In raising her they hadn’t been content to trust in genes. They’d schooled her at home, providing her with private tutoring and special classes. Stifling a little sigh, Zoë glanced around the small, meticulously neat office. This was the kind of world that her parents had raised her to fit into. And she was very good at what she was doing. So why did she feel so...trapped? Moving to the window, she gazed out at the quad. The slant of the morning sun sent long shadows across the lush green grass. The two times she’d actually done what she’d wanted and strayed from her parents’ expectations of her, she’d messed up. After her experiment with life on the wild side her freshman year in college, they’d insisted she go into therapy. They’d refused to even talk to her during the two months she’d worked at the CIA. Poor judgment and a sinful waste of her talents, they’d called it. Taking the job at the CIA had been her last little rebellion against their plans for her. She’d thought that her work there would bring her the kind of adventure she’d always secretly dreamed about. She’d even studied Karate in the hopes of eventually becoming a field agent. But the only real excitement that she’d experienced in her work as a CIA data analyst had been of a vicarious nature, reading and analyzing the reports of one particular field agent whose code name was Lucifer. Her job had been to analyze the probability that he’d carried out a hit on a fellow agent. Of course, he hadn’t, but in the course of gathering intelligence on Lucifer, she’d become insatiably curious about the man. His reputation was mythic. He was such a master of disguise that no one even knew what he looked like. His track record for getting the job done was flawless. There was even a theory that he didn’t really exist, that Lucifer was merely a code name for a group of agents who performed dangerous and secret missions. But Zoë didn’t believe that. She’d read all of his reports, and there was something very distinctive about Lucifer’s style, a kind of dry humor that appealed to her. And she admired the careful planning that was a hallmark of any mission he worked on. But the thing she’d admired most about Lucifer was the integrity that lay beneath all of his work. Lucifer was a man who could be trusted. Was it any wonder that he’d become so firmly rooted in her imagination? He was living the life of adventure that she’d always secretly dreamed about. She’d even created a picture of him in her mind. He resembled his dark angel namesake – with longish dark hair and brilliant blue eyes. As she’d continued to gather and analyze information on him, Lucifer had begun to play a very active role in her fantasy life. She supposed that she’d even fallen a bit in love with him just as Shakespeare’s Desdemona had fallen in love with the amazing stories that Othello had told her. Zoë frowned. Desdemona clearly hadn’t seen the real Othello. And her boss at the CIA, Hadley Richards, had told her that she hadn’t “seen” the real Lucifer. He’d been very displeased with her final report on the super agent. Zoë turned from the window to glance back at the notebook on her desk. Come to think of it, Jed Calhoun reminded her a bit of Lucifer. Not that he was a super spy. Her lips curved at the absurdity of that idea. But Jed did have a similar air of mystery about him. There had to be a reason why he was staying with his friend Ryder Kane, but not even her boss Sierra, who was Ryder’s fiancée, seemed to know the particulars. And Jed was living on the houseboat that Ryder kept on the Chesapeake Bay, not in Ryder’s apartment in DC. It was almost as if Jed Calhoun was in hiding. Why? (continued...) |
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