Only she knew just as clearly that despite the way he made her feel, Knight was devoted to his job as special agent, not her. She didn’t trust him to keep her abreast of the case.
And she didn’t trust herself not to fall head over heels for him.
“Yes,” she lied, waiting for a bolt of lightning to come out of the sky and zing her on her bare ass. “I’m leaving tomorrow. Two o’clock flight. ”
It wasn’t a lie if there was a reason for it.
That’s what her brother Ryan had always told her, and she thought it made perfect sense.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Reese had lied to him.He didn’t know why. He wasn’t even entirely sure about what. But he just knew she had.
Her eyes opened a little too wide when she lied and a sort of cocky swagger sent her shoulders arching up, which is exactly what she had done in bed with him when he had asked her if she was leaving.
Derek nursed his tepid coffee, stretched his legs in front of him, and tried to focus on Nordstrom droning on and on in his ear.
It was Monday morning, nine A.M., and Reese was back in New York. Or so she said.
Derek felt cranky, on edge, and a little bit like he missed her. Sleeping on his couch alone last night while Claire slept in his bed had been a stark and lonely contrast to the night before, when he had slept with Reese snuggled up next to him, naked.
Neither one of them had mentioned going to the store for condoms again, but had simply gone to sleep after talking. Derek suspected that they both knew sex would be too much, too intimate, and that they might be facing regrets about Reese leaving if they took that step.
Not that he wasn’t facing regrets anyway, because he was.
And what they had done had been pretty damn intimate.
The way Reese’s mouth had wrapped around his cock, her tongue lapping him up…
Derek shifted in his chair and stuck his hand in his pocket. He was back to wearing a cheap suit this morning, his old gray one, and he had to admit he liked the new one better. He liked the look in Reese’s eye when she had caught sight of him. Lust. Heavy, wet, dripping, raging lust.
Christ. He shifted again.
“Are you listening to me?” Nordstrom said sharply, perched on the corner of his desk.
No. “Of course I am, sir.”
Special Agent Maddock, seated next to Derek, looked over at him curiously, his eyebrow quirking up in question. Derek shook his head a little and focused on Nordstrom, whose receding hairline was tinting a soft pink as his blood pressure shot up in anger.
“Then why the hell are you just staring at me? Can you get Markson to wear a wire or not?”
Derek knew the case was coming to this. He had delivered the documents to Nordstrom on Sunday and they had spent the better part of an hour this morning discussing the holes in the evidence.
Essentially, price-fixing was hinted at in the documents, which were various email transcripts and financial records of profits from the abnormally high-priced drugs in question.
But in order to prove their case, the Justice Department needed actual conversations between executives where they discussed slicing up the market share, deciding who would patent which drugs, and what each price would be.
The FBI, and Derek in particular, needed Markson to wear a wire anytime he was with other board members and hope he could coax admissions of guilt out of them. And they especiallyneeded him comfortable recording his coworkers before the big price-fixing meeting scheduled for two weeks down the road, in New Zealand, where the three companies in question would actually sit around a table and divvy up the market for the products in question.
“Markson is a skittish CW. It’s going to take some coaxing.” The chemist, who was also a products division executive, had made Derek nervous since day one when he had contacted the FBI on his own and claimed knowledge of illegal price-fixing.
In his fifteen years on the job, Derek had never seen that. Witnesses don’t just stroll into the FBI field office and offer to bite the hand that feeds them. It made him suspicious of Markson’s motives. The man claimed he just wanted to do what was right, that the guilt of ripping off consumers in need of meds kept him up at night.
Derek had seen too much to avoid being a little bit cynical about Markson’s explanation.
But there was clearly illegal activity going on in Delco and Markson was their only in. He was the only way they had to get insider information and hopefully actual documented conversations between the executives making the price-fixing decisions.
“So coax him. Hold his damn hand for all I care, just get it done.” Nordstrom straightened his tie and dared Derek to defy him.