You've Got Male

He marveled at how anyone who’d just kicked the shit out of him could look so fragile and reserved. Were it not for her ridiculous outfit, she’d even look prim. But what amazed him even more was that he actually found her kind of attractive. In a weird, bohemian, I-really-need-to-be-evaluated kind of way. Though it wasn’t necessarily Avery he was thinking needed the evaluation.

Nevertheless, even after all she’d been through in the past few hours, she was surprisingly pretty. That first night he’d been in her apartment, Dixon had thought her eyes only looked enormous because of her glasses. Nobody, he’d thought, could have eyes that big or lashes that thick. But without the glasses her eyes were even larger. There had been times tonight when he’d nearly lost himself in their bottomless blue depths. And when he’d seen how that one braid had come unbound to leave her hair flowing over one shoulder like a shimmering, inky river, he’d found himself wanting to touch it, to see if it was as silky as it looked. Now that she’d rewoven her hair the way it belonged, he felt like a child denied his favorite plaything.

But Avery Nesbitt wasn’t a plaything. Quite the contrary. If things turned out the way they were planning, she might be the most powerful weapon OPUS had at its disposal.

“Judging by the restraints,” she said, “I’m assuming that I’m under arrest now.”

She was perched on the very edge of the cot, her right hand massaging her left wrist where the restraints had been. A pang of guilt shot through Dixon. Seeing her like this, the thought of restraining her seemed silly. She looked like a delicate bird who’d injured its wing, and he couldn’t quite jibe the wounded chick with the raging terminator of a little while ago.

Agoraphobia. That’s what she said she had. Yet nowhere in his research of her had there been any mention of her suffering from such a condition. Not in her prison records, not in her medical records, nowhere. Either she was lying about it or else she was lying about it. Because OPUS didn’t miss things like that. But if she was lying about being agoraphobic, then what had caused her to go off the way she had back at her place? And if she wasn’t lying about being agoraphobic, why was she suddenly feeling okay again, even though she wasn’t at home? Why wasn’t she still throwing a fit or being catatonic or something?

Just what was the deal with Avery Nesbitt?

He waggled his head back and forth a little. “Well, you are under arrest and you aren’t,” he told her evasively.

She stopped rubbing her wrist and let both hands fall into her lap. “If I’m not under arrest, then I demand to be released immediately,” she said levelly. “And if I am under arrest, you’ll never make it stick, so I demand to be released immediately.”

“What makes you think we won’t make it stick?” he asked. Mostly because he was sure that whatever her argument was, it was bound to be entertaining.

“You didn’t read me my rights,” she told him.

“I don’t have to,” he told her right back.

“Says who?”

“Says the agency I work for.”

“Which, as I’ve said—several times, in fact—I’m still not convinced exists anywhere outside your own delusions.”

“Look around you, Peaches,” Dixon said. “If OPUS doesn’t exist, then where do you think you are?”

“I have no idea,” she replied. “Could be the renovated garage of some psychopath for all I know. Some psychopath like—oh, gee, who could I be thinking of?—you.”

He didn’t rise to the bait. “If you’d studied my ID more closely, you’d have realized it’s totally genuine.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “You didn’t give me much of a chance to make up my mind about it. You were too busy tackling, harassing and groping me.”

“Well, if you’d been a better hostess, I wouldn’t have had to tackle or harass you. The groping probably would have happened at some point, though,” he added, trying not to sound too smug. “Somehow it almost always comes to that. Whether I’m working or not.”

“You searched me illegally,” she continued, obviously thinking it best to not dwell on that groping business.

“But it was fun, wasn’t it?” Dixon said. He rather liked the idea of keeping the groping topic alive. Though he hated to think why.

“It was illegal,” she said again.

“Actually it wasn’t,” he assured her. “Our rules of operation fall outside the traditional channels for most law-enforcement agencies. Probably because technically we’re not a law-enforcement agency.”

“You gained entry into my apartment unlawfully,” she pointed out.

“It’s not unlawful when OPUS is doing it,” Dixon told her. “Those untraditional channels again.”

She eyed him narrowly. “Does the Libertarian Party know about your agency?”

He shook his head. “Only the people OPUS wants to know about it know about OPUS. Anyone else finds out, they don’t live long enough to talk about it.”

“I’m going to talk about it,” she told him. “I’m going to tell everyone. Starting with the Libertarian Party.”

“You go ahead and do that,” Dixon told her. “And we’ll make you look like a raving lunatic who doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

“That won’t be a problem for the Libertarian Party.”

“We’ll make it a problem for them.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Yep.”

“You can’t threaten the Libertarian Party.”

“Peaches, we can threaten any party we like, be it Libertarian, Birthday, Tupperware or Slumber. And they all forget all about us when we do.”

Her jaw set tight, she hissed, “Fascist.”

He smiled. “You’re cute when you’re angry, you know that?”

This time her reply was a snarl. And he hated to say it, but she was even cuter when she did that.

A soft knock on the door made him turn around, and through the wire-reinforced window he saw the round, bland face of Mr. No-Name. Behind him was Tanner Gillespie, who still looked a little shaken from this evening’s encounter.

The boss man pushed a series of numbers on a keypad below the doorknob, and the lock released with a soft click. The already small room shrank to microscopic when the two men entered, making Dixon feel crowded and uncomfortable. Avery seemed not to be bothered at all.

Agoraphobia. Right.

“Ms. Nesbitt,” Dixon’s boss said without awaiting an introduction.

She didn’t reply at first, her attention flickering to Dixon instead. He wasn’t sure what she wanted from him, so he only met her gaze in return. After a moment, she looked at No-Name again.

“Do I know you?” she asked.

“No,” he replied immediately.

“You sure? You look familiar.”

“I’m not.”

“But—”

Before she could say more, he hurried on, “You’re a difficult woman to pin down, Ms. Nesbitt.”