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The unthinkable was happening!

Andrew—the smart, witty, creative, articulate man with whom Avery had fallen passionately in love—was cheating on her.

A month ago she’d known their first encounter must have been destiny. Fate. Kismet. It was simply Meant To Be. What difference did it make if they’d never actually met in person? Who cared if they’d never actually spoken to each other? Their cyber relationship was a meeting of minds, a melding of souls, a blending of hearts.

Until now.

Now he was typing nauseating pop-culture-infested lines to some cheap bit of cyberfluff with the screen name Tinky Bell. A brainless ninny who said things like “ur 2 kewl.”

The hideous massacre of the English language aside, Avery couldn’t believer her Andrew was talking about TV shows! He didn’t even watch TV!

But the clincher was Andrew using with Tinky Bell the same words that won Avery’s heart.

Well, she’d fix Andrew. Not only would she dump him, but she’d give him something to remember her by. Oh, yes. She’d create just the right farewell gift…one he and his precious computer system would never forget.

You’ve Got Male
Elizabeth Bevarly

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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For Mom, with love.

Because it’s been too long since I dedicated a book to you.

Thanks for so many things. You’re the best.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Acknowledgments

I have many people to thank for this one.

First, thanks to Liz Bemis of Bemis Web Design for helping me get all the technical jargon and equipment right, thereby enabling me to make Avery the computer whiz and Webhead that she is. Some of the technology and equipment that both OPUS and Avery use I made up myself, but it’s okay, because making up stuff is my job. If I did get anything wrong with the real stuff, it’s my fault, not Liz’s.

Thanks to Wanda Ottewell, my fabulous editor, for helping me buff the rough spots and see the gaps, and make everything in the story nice and neat. Thanks to Tracy Farrell and HQN Books for giving this book such a wonderful home. Thanks to Steve Axelrod for helping me find that home.

I’d also like to thank the incredibly nice, patient, generous David Dafoe, of Pro-Liquitech, whose lovely donation to Turning Point for Autism won him a brief appearance in the book. For more information about all the great things Turning Point does, visit their Web site at turningpoint1.com (don’t forget the 1!). It was great fun being able to invite a real person to the party at the Nesbitt estate.

Thanks, too, to good friends (you know who you are) for daily support and camaraderie and laughter that goes above and beyond the call of friendship. Without you guys, I’d be like Avery at the opening of chapter four.

And finally, as always, thanks to David and Eli, my lifelines. My life. Without you guys, I’d be lost.

I love you both bunches. Hug. Kiss. Pat.

You’ve Got Male

CHAPTER ONE

AVERY NESBITT WAS IN LOVE. Madly, passionately, wildly in love. She was besotted. She was bedazzled. She was befuddled. She was in love as she’d never been in love before.

And it was with a man who went beyond dreamy. He was smart and witty. He was creative and articulate. He was handsome and sexy. He always said what she needed to hear, right when she needed to hear it. He knew her backward and forward, just as she knew him inside and out. And he loved her exactly the way she was. That, more than anything else, had sealed her fate and ensured that her love would last forever. Andrew Paddington made Avery feel as if nothing in her life would ever go wrong again. He was just perfect in every way.

The bastard.

Theirs had been a whirlwind courtship, had come at Avery out of nowhere and swept her into a fantasy worthy of an epic romance. Andrew was in her thoughts and her dreams, in her plans and her performance, in her ego and her id. He filled her days with delight and her nights with pleasure, imbued her with joy that made her downright giddy. And that was no small accomplishment for a woman who was normally pragmatic, cynical and down-to-earth. Although Avery had only met him a month ago, she’d known after that first encounter that their meeting must have been destiny. Fate. Kismet. It was simply Meant To Be.

Bastard.

What difference did it make if they’d never actually met in person? Physical trappings weren’t what love was about. Love was a meeting of minds, a melding of souls, a blending of hearts. Besides, they’d exchanged photos, and the ones he’d sent to her depicted him as a sandy-haired twentysomething with the eyes of a poet, the mouth of a troubadour, the hands of an artist and phenomenal pecs. He was an utter, unmitigated masterpiece.

Bastard, bastard, bastard.

Who cared if they’d never actually spoken to each other? Vocal avowals of devotion were as nebulous and inconstant as the wind. Avery had Andrew’s love for her in writing. In the loveliest prose she’d ever read, words—feelings—wrought so tenderly, they would move a despot to tears. After only four weeks, she had a file filled with his e-mails to her and she’d logged every chat-room exchange they’d shared in a special folder titled Snookypie. On those nights when she was alone and feeling dreamy and lovey-dovey, she lit candles and opened a bottle of wine, then read over his words again and again, pretending he was right there in her Central Park West condo, murmuring them into her ear.

Bastard squared.

But now the unthinkable was happening. Andrew was cheating on her with another woman. And Avery was finding out about it just as women did on those bad made-for-cable movies. She’d walked in on him and found him in bed with another woman.

Well, okay, figuratively speaking. What had actually happened was that she’d stumbled upon him online, blabbing away with some cheap bit of cyberfluff in, of all places, a Survivor: Mall of America chat room. This after Andrew had assured Avery that he loathed popular culture as much as she did. But what really toasted her melbas was that the cyberfluff he was chatting with, who went by the screen name of—Avery had to bite back her nausea when she saw it—Tinky Belle, was clearly an idiot. But Andrew was agreeing with her that the music of Clay Aiken could, if people would just open their eyes and ears and hearts to it, bring peace and harmony to the entire planet.

Bastard cubed.

Unable to believe her eyes, Avery felt around until she located the chair in front of her desk and clumsily pulled it out. Then she nearly missed the surface of her desk when she set her bowl of Cajun popcorn and the bottle of Wild Cherry Pepsi on top of it. She tugged at her electric-blue pajama pants spattered with images of French landmarks and numbly sat down, adjusting the oversize purple sweatshirt boasting Wellesley College as she did. Then she wiggled her toes in her fuzzy pink slippers to warm them, adjusted her little black-framed glasses on the bridge of her nose, pushed one of two long, thick black braids over her shoulder and studied the screen more closely.

Maybe she was wrong, she thought as she watched the rapid-fire exchange scroll by. She shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Surely Andrew wasn’t the only guy out there in cyberspace who used the handle Mad2Live. It was a phrase from On the Road, after all. And there were probably lots of Kerouac fans online. Andrew loved Avery. He’d told her so. He wouldn’t cheat on her like this. Especially not with some brainless ninny who said things like, “ur 2 kewl mad.”

Please, people! she wanted to shout at the screen whenever she saw message-board shorthand. Speak English! Or Spanish! Or French! Or German! Or some legitimate language that indicates you’re at least halfway literate! And capitalize where necessary! And for God’s sake, punctuate!

Even though she was a computer geek in the most extreme sense of the word, Avery couldn’t bring herself to type in anything other than the language she’d learned growing up in the Hamptons. Tony private schools could mess with you in a lot of ways, she knew, but at least they taught you to be well-spoken. That shouldn’t change just because your language of choice was cyber-speak.

She watched Mad2Live and Tinky Belle—gag—swap warm fuzzies for as long as she could stomach it and ultimately decided there was no way that this Mad2Live could be Andrew. Andrew would never, ever concede that the Survivor series was, as Tinky Belle claimed, “qualty educatnl programing u cn wach w/ the hole famly.”

Oh, yes, Avery thought. It’s definitely mus c tv.

She was about to leave the chat room to visit another—she was, after all, supposed to be working—when Mad2Live posted something that made her fingers convulse on the mouse: You, Tinky Belle, are a dazzling blossom of hope burgeoning at the center of an unforgiving cultural wasteland.

Acid heat splashed through Avery’s belly when she read that. Because those were the exact words Andrew had used to describe her that first night they met in a Henry James chat room. Except for the Tinky Belle part, since Avery’s screen name—at least that night—had been Daisy Miller. There was no way there could be two Mad2Lives on the Internet flirting with women by calling them dazzling blossoms of hope who burgeoned in cultural wastelands. That was Andrew—her Andrew—through and through.

After that it was impossible for Avery to ignore Tinky and Mad’s conversation. And as she watched the lines of dialogue on her screen roll past, she read more and more from Mad2Live that was pulled verbatim from some of the e-mails Andrew had sent to her. And she should know, since she’d practically memorized some of them.

Had she mentioned he was a complete bastard?

Eventually Tinky bade farewell to Mad and evaporated from the chat room, and Avery watched in astonishment as he immediately began to flirt with another occupant, this one calling herself Deb2000. But Deb wasn’t impressed by any of Mad’s cajoling, so, obviously disgruntled, Mad signed out of the chat room.

And Avery followed him.

Luckily she had dozens of screen names she used for her work and she could log in to rooms under several that Andrew would never recognize. And luckily, too, she knew the online community better than she knew even her own Manhattan neighborhood. Because the Internet was where Avery worked every single night. And it was where she played after she knocked off work. It was also where she shopped, where she learned and where she socialized. It was where she found her music, her books, her entertainment and her dinner selections. Hell, she pretty much lived on the Net. And she knew Andrew almost as well as she knew the online community.

Or at least she’d thought she knew him that well. But now she was beginning to think him a complete stranger. Because he flitted from one chat room to another, all of them themed around shallow pop-culture subject matter—everything from Pilates to low-carb cuisine—and in every one of them he waited long enough to identify which of the room’s inhabitants were female and which seemed to be the least, uh, bright. And then he chose one and began to work on her in exactly the way he had worked on Avery that first night he’d encountered her. And shame boiled within her when she realized that she had capitulated to his pretty words as easily as had women who thought deep-fried pork flesh was an essential part of good nutrition.

How could he do this to her? How could he think she was stupid? She? Avery Nesbitt? She wasn’t stupid. She was a criminal genius! Even Time magazine had said so! And even if the criminal part was debatable, once a genius, always a genius. How could he cheat on her this way? And be so obvious about it? He knew how good she was. He knew what she did for a living and how much time she spent online. He knew everything about her. She’d even told him about her past transgressions, and he hadn’t flinched. He’d told her her past didn’t matter, that anything that had happened before the day he met her wasn’t important because he didn’t start living until the day he met her.

Oh, he was such a bastard.

Well, she’d fix Andrew. Not only would she dump him faster than you could say, “Survivor: Up Yours,” but she’d give him something to remember her by, too. She’d blow off work and stay up all night if she had to to concoct just the right farewell gift.

Of course, being up all night wasn’t exactly a sacrifice to Avery, since she pretty much lived her life at night anyway. Nighttime didn’t have rules or expectations the way daytime hours did. So when most people were coming home from their jobs and starting to wind down, Avery was rising and revving to go. And when most people’s alarm clocks were going off and signaling the beginning of their workday, Avery was pouring herself a scotch and popping a DVD of a Cracker mystery into the player and trying to wind down. Unfortunately, she’d never been as good at winding down as she was at revving up.

Because Avery Nesbitt was what some people—those who claimed an ounce or two of compassion—called “a bit neurotic.” She was what other people—those who didn’t give a damn about compassion—called “totally whack.” Hey, what else could you call a woman who lived in her pajamas on the Internet and never left her apartment unless it was to take her cat to the vet, and even then had to load up on half a bottle of scotch just to get herself over the threshold? What else did you call a woman who bought into the tripe men like Andrew Paddington fed to unsuspecting morons?

But Avery didn’t care what anyone thought about her these days, any more than she’d cared when she was a kid. She especially didn’t care tonight. Tonight and tomorrow night—and all the hours in between—she had other things on her mind. Her gift for Andrew would take the better part of the next forty-eight hours to create.

Fortunately for Avery, she was totally whack and had nowhere else to go.

“HEY, HOW’S IT FEELING OUT there, Dixon?”

“Like Antarctica. Only without all the warm toastiness.”

“Well, we’ll see if we can’t get you something closer to Greenland next time you’re in the field.”

“How many times do I have to remind you people—I’m not supposed to be in the field!”

Because the field was cold and harsh and unforgiving. Even with a laptop and a decent cup of coffee.

Dixon tugged the zipper of his leather jacket higher, curled his hands around a quickly cooling cup of espresso and pulled his backward-facing driver’s cap farther down over inky black hair that was badly in need of a trim. But that did little to warm him below the waist, and faded blue jeans, though normally his favorite garment, weren’t all that effective in warding off the cold.

Even the cold found in the back of a van that was insulated with high-tech surveillance equipment.

He was infinitely more suited to the great indoors, he thought as he switched his attention from the laptop monitor to a television screen that offered a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the area outside the van. Yeah, indoors he could get a hot shower and a hot sandwich and some hot coffee. Life didn’t get much better than that. Unless maybe you substituted warmed brandy for the hot coffee and added a hot woman with hot hands to the hot shower. Preferably one with a hot name like Lola or Mimi or Fritzi or—

“Dixon?”

No, that wouldn’t work. That was the name he was going by himself these days. It would get way too confusing. So maybe he could just call her—

“Dixon?”

“What?” he said, grinding the words out irritably as his hot shower/hot woman fantasy receded to the back of his brain, leaving him even colder than before.

“You need anything?”

He bit back a grumble at the question that came through the earpiece of his headset. Hadn’t he just been thinking about that when the other agent rudely interrupted him?

“No, Gillespie,” he muttered into the microphone below his chin to the newly minted OPUS agent who’d been assigned to shadow him—more to keep Gillespie out of trouble than anything else, Dixon knew. “I don’t need anything.” Except for his usual partner to get back from her leave of absence so she could go into the field instead of him, the way she was supposed to. That way Dixon could go back to collecting the information she sent him and find the missing pieces. Indoors. Where he normally worked. Where it was warm.

Because that was standard operating procedure at Dixon’s employer, the ultrasecret Office of Political Unity and Security. Agents worked in teams of two, with one in the field collecting information and the other behind the scenes analyzing it. Assimilate, evaluate, articulate. That was Dixon’s three-word job description. He was the one responsible for making sense of the intelligence, not the one who gathered it. He was the one who analyzed and scrutinized, calculated and estimated, and then put everything together. He wasn’t the one who sat on his butt in a cold van waiting for something to happen. At least, he wasn’t supposed to be.

“Oh, there is one thing, Gillespie,” he said, picturing the other agent in his head. Blond, Dixon recalled. Too blond to be taken seriously, really. His dark blue eyes—cool and sharp and distant—were the only thing that had kept the guy from looking like some gee-whiz, what’s for-supper-Mom, all-American high school football hero.

“What’s that?” the other man asked.

“Stop calling me Dixon,” Dixon said. “That’s not my name.”

Gillespie snorted—or something—at the other end of the line. “Yeah, well, my name isn’t Gillespie, either, but you have to call me something.”

Oh, stop making it so easy, Dixon thought. “I keep forgetting your code name. What is it again?”

“Cowboy,” the other man said.

Yee-haw, Dixon thought. He just hoped he could say it with a straight face.

“Besides,” Cowboy added, “nobody at my level knows your name. Except for your code name. And you told me never to call you—”

“Okay, Dixon is fine,” Dixon hastily amended.

“—that,” the other man finished at the same time. “What? You thought I was going to say your code name out loud? Are you nuts? I’m not nuts. From what I hear, the last guy who spoke your code name out loud is still in the hospital. You’re a dangerous man.”

Damn straight, Dixon thought. And he wouldn’t have it any other way. Except that he’d be a dangerous man out of the cold. Literally if not figuratively.

The only thing worse than being in the field—where he wasn’t supposed to be anyway, in case he hadn’t mentioned it—was being in the field in New York City. Mostly because there were no fields in New York City. Except for those in Central Park, which, okay, were very nice, but they were nothing compared to the rolling green hills surrounding the Virginia farm where he’d grown up. And even though Dixon was currently parked right next to Central Park, he had to be focused on the big tidy building across from it instead. The big tidy building full of outrageously expensive condominiums that only people with more dollars than sense could afford to call their own.

The big tidy building where Daisy Miller lived.

Of course, her name was no more Daisy Miller than his was Dixon. But he’d had to have something to call her, just as he’d had to have something to put on his phony driver’s license, in case one of New York’s finest wandered by and wondered what a nondescript white van was doing parked in front of a Central Park West address for hours and hours and, oh, look, is that a dead debutante in the back the way there always is on Law & Order?

It was a pain in the ass trying to do surveillance in New York City. Yeah, he was good at what he did—quite possibly the best—but it would take an übergenius to clear up some of the audio crap he’d been trying to weed through all evening. Between the lousy weather—which the first week of November was way too early for—and the incessant cell phone use of millions of people and the twenty gazillion satellite channels beaming down from space and the simple proliferation of car and pedestrian traffic, listening in on Daisy Miller’s residence this week had been next to impossible. Though Dixon had gotten some decent info about a certain mutual fund when some stockbroker’s cell phone conversation had overlapped with Daisy’s frantic call to the veterinarian about her cat’s digestive problems. Not to mention a very nice tip on the seventh race at Hialeah tomorrow from some guy named Sal who seemed to know what he was talking about.

Fortunately except for that call to the vet and a follow-up the next day—her cat, thank God, was just fine once it passed that button—Daisy’s activity in her apartment was limited to the point of being nonexistent. But then, so was her activity out of her apartment. In fact, in the week that Dixon had been keeping an eye on the place, he was reasonably certain she hadn’t left the building once. And that bothered him a lot on some level he couldn’t even name. Yeah, there was a definite cold snap going on in the city, and lots of people worked at home these days, but to not leave one’s house one single time in a full week? Not even to go to a movie or pick up a gallon of milk or buy a lottery ticket? That was just…weird.

He wished he knew more about her. Which was a strange feeling for him, because anytime Dixon—or anyone else he worked with at OPUS—had wanted to know more about someone, it had taken less than a day to find out everything about that person. That was a big part of his job, after all—to find out whatever he could about suspicious characters. And thanks to all the sophisticated equipment and arcane networks he had at his fingertips—not to mention his superior brain—Dixon never had much trouble doing his job. With Daisy, though…

She was good. Better than he was, Dixon had been forced to concede reluctantly. Not only did she have some kind of screening device on her phone he couldn’t figure out, but she had a firewall on her computer unlike anything he’d ever seen before—both of them homemade and high-tech and very, very effective. He’d managed to chip a few chinks in the firewall through the course of the week, but only enough to be able to keep track of her when she was online with her desktop. And even then it was more because he’d been able to tap into her wireless server and track her from there. Her ’puter just thumbed its nose at his efforts. And her laptop—forget about it. Luckily for him, she rarely used that. Even so, Dixon hadn’t been able to fish any pertinent information out of her computer files. Not even her real name. He didn’t even know which apartment in the building was hers, only that she did live in this building. And he’d only been able to trace that much of her because, before this week, he’d been surveilling her online boyfriend, Andrew Paddington, and had intercepted some of the e-mails he’d sent to Daisy.

Not that Andrew Paddington’s name was really Andrew Paddington, either. Him, Dixon knew well. Too well. And he was a rank bastard. Of course, everyone at OPUS knew Andrew Paddington. Only they all knew him by his real name: Adrian Padgett. And they all thought he was a rank bastard, too. Because once upon a time they’d all believed Adrian was one of them and then had discovered, too late, that he was nobody’s man but his own. And a very bad man, at that.

It had been years since they’d heard from Adrian after he went rogue from his position at the Office of Political Unity and Security with millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains and a formerly secret network hanging out to dry. Then suddenly a year and a half ago he’d re-surfaced in, of all places, his hometown of Indianapolis. He’d been trying to pass himself off as a legitimate businessman by the name of Adrian Windsor, but there was nothing legitimate about Adrian. If he’d surfaced after years of being underground, it could only be because he was up to no good. OPUS had discovered his activities and deterred him in time to prevent him from doing any real damage, but they’d never quite figured out what exactly his activities were leading to, and he’d slipped away before they’d been able to find out. Something illegal, though, that was for damned sure. Because Adrian didn’t know how to operate inside the law.

They’d lost track of him for nine months after he’d left Indianapolis, in spite of making him their number-one priority for apprehension. Finally, thanks in large part to the efforts of Dixon and his partner, OPUS had unearthed Adrian again a few months ago, living in New York City…where he seemed to be doing little more than joining online dating services and chatting up young women on the Internet.

Oh, he was definitely up to no good. The bastard. Dixon just wished he knew what it was.

But Adrian’s OPUS code name hadn’t been Sorcerer for nothing. He could make magic when he wanted to. He could make himself invisible. He could make himself be anyone—or anything—he wanted. And he could mesmerize other people—ordinary, decent, moral people—into thinking they were doing the right thing by helping him out. Other people like, oh…Dixon didn’t know…Daisy Miller.

Who the hell was she anyway?

Not that she seemed ordinary in any way. Or decent, considering what Dixon had read in some of the snippets he’d been able to decrypt from her e-mails to Andrew/Adrian/Sorcerer. As for moral, well…the jury was still out on that. Could be she was just another one of Sorcerer’s clueless pawns. Or she might be someone as illicitly inclined as he was. Whoever she was, Dixon could see why Sorcerer wanted her. Not just because if she was living here, she had a bundle of money, but if her homemade phone screen and firewall were anything to go by, she also knew a thing or two about communication technology and software. And since Sorcerer’s last incarnation had been as a high-level executive for a computer software company in Indianapolis, it was a safe bet that whatever he was up to had something to do with that particular medium.

Although Dixon was fully prepared, and able, to break into Daisy’s apartment and bug the hell out of the place if she ever left long enough for him to manage it—and if, you know, he ever found it—he hadn’t had the opportunity to do so because she never went anywhere. So he’d had to make do with industrial-strength microphones that caught every other damned thing in a half-mile radius, too, and try to filter out what he could. And he’d had to intercept what he could of her online activity through the airwaves. But her firewall made even that hard to do.

Tonight Daisy seemed to be especially active, darting from one chat room to another without even posting in any of them. Not that that was so unusual, since she seemed to be following Sorcerer. Plus, she just spent a lot of time in chat rooms—enough so that Dixon suspected she was a bit neurotic.

But what he’d come to view as her regular haunts were a lot more esoteric than the ones she was visiting tonight. In addition to the Henry James site, she liked the Libertarian Party home page, the Ruth Gordon Fan Club, the Mo Rocca is a Total Babe site, one headed up by the words Love Animals Don’t Cut Them into Pieces and Ingest Them, several Magic: the Gathering sites and the Cracker Mysteries site.

That last was where she had declared on the message board that she wanted to have Robbie Coltrane’s love child and name it Clem. Dixon had tried to reassure himself that she must have been drinking pretty heavily that night. Somehow, though, that had brought little reassurance. All in all, had he met Daisy Miller at a cocktail party, he could safely say he’d want to keep his distance.

Nevertheless, she was very intriguing. And he couldn’t say he hadn’t enjoyed some parts of this week. Just not tonight, since it was so friggin’ cold and her activity online was so friggin’ weird. He was supposed to be on duty until daybreak, when Daisy’s activity generally started to ebb, whereupon he’d be relieved by another agent, whose job would be even more boring than his was, because the daylight hours seemed to be the time when Daisy shutdown.

He was about to contact Cowboy and tell the other man he was calling it a night when suddenly, out of nowhere, Dixon got his big break. Because right when he was thinking this was pointless and he might as well pack it in, Daisy Miller picked up her phone and made a call. When he picked up the sound of a man’s voice evidently answering the phone at the other end of the line with a cheery, “Hello, Eastern Star Earth-Friendly Market,” he quickly looked up the address on his laptop and saw that it was an all-night market three blocks away.

More satisfying than that, though, was when he heard Daisy—whose voice was very familiar by now—say, “Hi, Mohammed, this is Avery Nesbitt. I need some things delivered.”

Dixon picked up one of the more primitive tools he had at his fingertips—a pad and pencil—and listened as Avery Nesbitt, aka Daisy Miller, ticked off a list of essentials that she needed delivered to the very building where Dixon had parked his van. And then Mohammed confirmed that those should go to apartment number—Oh, yes, there is a God—7B, right? Yes, thanks, Mohammed, and please charge it to my account, as usual. And add fifteen percent for the delivery boy, twenty if he can deliver it tonight, ’cause I’m really running low on milk. He can? Great. Thanks again, Mohammed, you’re the best.

Avery Nesbitt. Dixon smiled at the words he’d scrawled on the pad of paper before him. Not Daisy Miller. And this week, from the market, Avery Nesbitt needed coffee, bread, peanut butter—the biggest jar you have, please, Mohammed—Froot Loops, Cap’n Crunch, a box of Chicken in a Biskit crackers, a six-pack of Wild Cherry Pepsi, some of those red-chili pistachios, a mondo bag of M&M’s, Sausalito cookies, tampons (she’d said that without an ounce of hesitation) and lots and lots of other stuff that had the nutritional equivalent of a big bag of lint.

Awful lot of caffeine and sugar on her list, Dixon reflected as he read his hastily jotted notes. Evidently Avery Nesbitt lived on nothing but carbohydrates. Which went a long way toward explaining why she stayed up all night, every night, the way she always did. And he found himself wondering what a woman could possibly have to do all night when she was home alone.

“Not playin’ Parcheesi, that’s for sure,” he muttered to himself.

And then he came to the last notation he’d made: Delivery tonight. That meant some guy would be bopping down the street very soon with a couple of big grocery sacks from the Eastern Star Earth-Friendly Market destined for Ms. Avery Nesbitt of apartment 7B.

Which gave Dixon an idea he really had no business entertaining.

He contacted Cowboy again, but this time it wasn’t to tell the man he was calling it a night. No, this time what Dixon told Cowboy was—

“I’m going in.”

“What?” the other man said.

“I’m going in,” he repeated.

“You’re coming in?” Cowboy asked. “It’s that boring?”

“Not coming in,” Dixon corrected him, “going in.”

“You mean going in as in…going in?”

Dixon smiled. “Yeah. I just a got a nice bit of intelligence and I want to follow up on it.”

“So you’re going in…where?”

Dixon rolled his eyes. Newbies. “To meet our girl,” he said.

“She-Wolf is back?” Cowboy asked, voicing the code name of Dixon’s regular partner and sounding very confused. “What’s she doing in New York? I thought she went home to Las Vegas to see her mother.”

“Not She-Wolf,” Dixon said. “Our other girl. Sorcerer’s contact.”

“Daisy Miller?”

“That’s the one.”

“But you can’t,” Cowboy said. “You don’t even know which apartment she’s in.”

“I do now. I told you. I just received some very nice intelligence. And it’s from an excellent source.” Himself. What better source could there be?

“Then you pass the intelligence along to me, Dixon,” Cowboy instructed. “And I figure out what to do with it. Assimilate, evaluate, articulate—that’s my job. And you don’t go in until I say it’s safe. Hell, you don’t go in, period, unless you’re the field agent.”

“But I am the field agent,” he reminded the other man, suddenly grateful for that anomaly.

“But you’re not supposed to be in the field,” Cowboy reminded him right back.

“Hey, I didn’t ask for this assignment,” Dixon said with all the mock innocence he could muster. “But you know how conscientious I am about doing my work the right way.”

“The hell you are. You’re as conscientious about that as I am.”

“And I want to make sure this job gets done right.”

“No, Dixon, you—”

“So I’m going in to make contact,” he told the other man finally. “I’ll let you know what happens when I get back.” He smiled to himself. No reason not to mess with the newbie a little. It was so much fun to hear them shriek. “If I come back alive, I mean.”

“What?” Cowboy shrieked.

“Wish me luck,” he said into the microphone before removing the headset altogether.

Not that that prevented him from hearing more shrieking.

“This is nuts, Dixon,” Cowboy told him. “Don’t go in there if it’s dangerous. You’re not even a field agent. You’re supposed to monitor the machines and analyze the data, like me. If anyone goes in to make contact, it should be She-Wolf. Wait for her before proceeding any further. She’ll be back in a couple of weeks. She’s the field agent. You don’t know what to do. You don’t know proper procedure.”

Oh, the hell he didn’t. He’d helped write the proper procedure. He’d been an OPUS agent when Cowboy was still fine-tuning his small motor skills.

“Dixon, I’m begging you,” Cowboy implored him. But he sounded resigned now. “You can’t go in. Please. You don’t have permission.”

Dixon chuckled as he flipped up the collar of his leather jacket and reached for the handle of the van’s side door.

No permission. Right. As if that had ever stopped him before.

CHAPTER TWO

AVERY WAS TOTALLY IMMERSED in creating the code to make her farewell gift to Andrew especially noxious when the doorbell rang and blew her concentration. When she glanced at the clock in the corner of her laptop computer screen, she saw that it was 4:08 a.m. Who on earth came calling at 4:08 in the morning? For that matter, who came calling at all? She hadn’t had any visitors to her apartment since…never. That was one of the things that happened when—cue the dramatic music in a minor key—debutantes go bad.

Then she remembered the groceries she’d ordered earlier. Duh. She really needed those tampons.

Saving the work she’d completed to her hard drive, Avery rose and made her way to the front door, switching on lights as she went, because she normally worked in the dark. She also launched herself into a full-body stretch, wondering how long she had been sitting still. It hadn’t been midnight yet when she’d started working, so more than four hours. Still, she’d gotten a lot done. In fact, she was doing a better job than she usually did for something like this, despite the fact that it had been years since she’d put one of these things together. Funny how productive you could be when someone pissed you off real bad.

Before opening the front door, she peeked through the peephole, frowning when the guy on the other side turned out to be neither Eddie, the usual night delivery guy, nor Mohammed, who from time to time made deliveries himself. Nor did the man out there look like someone who would make his living delivering groceries in the first place. No, thanks to his enormous size—although he was distorted by the fish-eye, he was clearly bigger than the average national monument—he seemed more like the kind of guy who would make his living as a longshoreman. Or a bouncer. Or a wrestler. Or a Mack truck.

Wow, just how bad was the economy, she wondered, if guys who looked like him were reduced to delivering groceries? Maybe she should start visiting CNN.com from time to time and see what was going on outside the walls of her apartment. Not that she really cared, quite frankly, but she was still a citizen of this state, even if she would have preferred to live in a different one. Like maybe the state of altered consciousness. Nice scenery there.

In spite of her misgivings about the delivery guy, Avery figured he must be legit because he was toting two brown grocery sacks with the Eastern Star Earth-Friendly Market logo on them. Pulling herself back from the peephole, she unfastened the four dead bolts and chain that she routinely kept locked in place, then dragged her front door open.

Holy cow. He was even bigger without the distortion of the fish-eye, she saw when she glimpsed the man in person. And now he really didn’t seem like someone who would be delivering groceries for a living. Once she got a better look at his face, Avery decided he was more the kind of guy whose job would involve being onstage somewhere—probably stripping down to his altogether while hundreds of screaming, frantic women stuffed their grocery money into his G-string. He was staggeringly handsome, from his finely wrought mouth to his ruggedly chiseled cheekbones to his aristocratic nose to his oh-my-God eyes.

But somehow Avery suspected the harshness of his features belied good breeding, since she had more than a nodding acquaintance with that—both good breeding and harshness. In spite of his tattered attire, he held himself as if he were someone who knew the rules and regulations of proper dress—he just chose not to abide by them. There was a strange mixture of majesty and menace about him, as if he would have been equally comfortable wielding a martini at a high-society function or breaking someone’s knuckles as an enforcer for the mob.

It was his eyes, though, that she found most unsettling. An icy, almost opaque green, they made her think of the deepest part of the ocean—where swam the most mysterious, dangerous creatures—frozen over. Instead of repelling her, however, the look in his eyes made her want to draw closer to him. But it wasn’t just his good looks that generated such a response in her. It simply had been so long since Avery had experienced the simple pleasure of being close to a man physically. Especially one who looked like him.

“Where do you want these?” he asked without preamble.

Automatically she jutted a thumb over her shoulder. “In the kitchen. Please,” she added as an afterthought, nearly forgetting the good manners that had been hammered into her during her years of after-school etiquette and deportment classes at Madame Yvette’s School for Genteel Young Ladies in East Hampton. “Thanks,” she added with some distraction. Wow. His eyes really were amazing. And the overly long black hair spilling out from beneath the driving cap he’d turned backward on his head only made their color seem that much lighter…and that much darker, too.

But the guy didn’t follow her instructions, only stood on the other side of the door gazing back at her. Incisively enough that she began to feel disconcerted, a feeling she really hated. In fact, it had been years since she had felt disconcerted, and she’d almost convinced herself she was incapable of feeling that anymore. Along with discomfort and shame and humiliation and all those other things that had once been her constant companions. The realization that this man, simply by showing up at her front door, could rouse even one of them—and so quickly, too, damn him—bothered her a lot.

She was about to snap another order at him when he inclined his head forward and said, “Do you mind?”

“Mind what?” she asked.

“Uh, stepping aside?” he told her. “So I can get through.”

Only then did Avery realize that he hadn’t come forward because she was blocking his way by standing there stupidly ogling him. Gee, had she felt disconcerted before? That was nothing compared to the mortification she felt now. Especially since she was leering at him again, thanks to the velvety pitch of his voice, a sound that skimmed over her like rough-calloused fingertips on naked flesh.

Oh, yeah. She’d definitely gone too long without physical closeness to the opposite sex if she was thinking a man’s request for her to step aside was the equivalent of foreplay. Good foreplay, at that.

“Oh. I’m sorry,” she apologized, moving to the side. “I…You’ll have to excuse me. I was working. My mind is still elsewhere.” Like on how the sound of your voice was making me orgasmic. “The kitchen is through there,” she added, pointing in that direction.

He sauntered past her, and she pushed the front door closed before following. As nice as his front side had been, Avery had to admit that the view from the rear—especially of his rear—was almost nicer. The faded jeans hugged his taut buttocks as snugly as Saran wrap—would that they were as transparent, too—swathing his lean thighs and calves. The leather of his jacket was cracked white in enough places to give it character, his shoulders broad and strong and hard-looking beneath it.

She bit back an involuntary sigh. She’d always loved a man’s back more than any other feature, liked how the muscles there were dense and plentiful and elegant and how the skin was smooth and warm and fine. She could have been perfectly content for days lying next to a naked man doing little more than running her open palm over his back. This man’s naked back, she was certain, would be spectacular.

When they entered her kitchen, she marveled at how much the room seemed to shrink with his presence. Funny, but she’d always considered the room to be larger than what most apartments in the city claimed. Unfortunately it was also messier than most apartments in the city, cluttered with empty cereal boxes and crumbled pretzel and potato-chip bags and dirty dishes that she hadn’t gotten around to putting into the dishwasher. Mostly because she hadn’t taken the clean dishes out.

Well, she’d been busy. Working. She had lots of work to do these days. Not to mention she was inherently lazy. In any event, there wasn’t even enough clear counter space for him to set down the groceries, so she muttered another apology and waved him toward the door that led to the dining room.

“Just put them on the table in there,” she said as she watched him head that way.

Where, she recalled belatedly, she had been working on Andrew’s gift, which was still sitting out in the open, where anybody could see it and get her into big, big trouble.

She started to call him back, then decided that if he was delivering groceries for a living, there was little chance he’d recognize what she was putting together on her laptop. So she let him go, crossing her arms over her midsection as she waited for him to return.

And waited. And waited. And waited.

Finally Avery took a few steps toward the other door and called out, “Is there something wrong?”

When she heard what sounded like the shuffling of paper, she bolted toward the dining room in a panic. She halted at the door, however, when she saw the delivery guy down on all fours, scooping up a sheaf of papers that he’d evidently spilled to the floor when he’d set the groceries down on the table.

“Oh, man, I’m sorry,” he said as he tried to straighten one piece of paper on top of another. “I knocked this stuff off when I set down one of the sacks. I hope I didn’t mess up anything you were working on.”

Only when her heart stopped slamming against her rib cage did Avery realize just how hard it had been pounding. Enough to make her light-headed. Though, truth be told, that might have been due to the fact that the delivery guy’s adorable butt was facing her, and bent over the way he was, she had an almost uncontrollable urge to go over there and sink her teeth into it.

Hoo-boy, she had to get out and meet some flesh-and-blood men. Though that might be a little difficult, since she was overcome with terror every time she even stepped out into the hallway. As it was, she tipped Billy the doorman to bring her mail up to her every day.

She gave herself a minute to calm down, then joined the delivery guy on the floor, gathering the papers closest to her. “Don’t worry about it,” she told him. “I was finished with that pile.”

It became clearer to Avery why he was working in the job he was as he tried to help her clean up. For every piece of paper she collected, he seemed to lose three, and although he tried to keep them in order as he gathered them, he kept turning them first one way, then another, as if he couldn’t tell which way they were supposed to go.

“Here,” she said gently, taking pity on him. “That’s okay. I’ll do it.”

He threw her a grateful smile and stood up, and within a few moments Avery had taken care of the mess herself. When she stood, the delivery guy was staring at her laptop, frowning at the lines of code that would be incoherent gibberish to anyone who wasn’t familiar with computer programming. He looked over at her and shrugged, smiling an “Oh, well” kind of smile.

“You must be one ’a them computer programmers,” he said.

“Kind of,” she told him evasively.

“I don’t know nothin’ ’bout computers myself. ’Cept how to send e-mail. And even then, a lotta times I’ll screw it up.”

She tried to smile reassuringly. “Well, that’s true for a lot of people. It can be confusing.”

He nodded enthusiastically. “Sure can.” He looked at the screen again, then thrust his chin toward it. “Just what’re you doin’ there anyway?” he asked.

Instinctively Avery moved to the laptop to protect her work, and even though her visitor clearly couldn’t find his megabyte from a hole in the ground, something told her to close the lid and hurry him on his way. Why was he hanging around anyway? she wondered. He’d get his tip from Mohammed when he returned, and she’d be billed for it. That was the way it always worked. Maybe Mohammed hadn’t explained that to him yet. This guy was probably new to the job, since Avery had never seen him before.

“Uh, it’s just something I’m working on for someone,” she hedged, pushing the top down on the computer as unobtrusively as she could. “Look, I told Mohammed to add your tip to the bill, since I don’t keep any money in the house,” she added.

The comment seemed to invite mischief, and Avery wanted more than ever to get the guy out of her apartment. He seemed nice enough, and Mohammed always did a thorough background check on his employees, but even guys who were easy on the eye could turn out to be anything but easy.

“Thanks for making the delivery so late,” she added, hoping that might spur him on.

But he didn’t take the hint, only stood on the other side of the table gazing at her, as if she were something worth gazing at. Which was the most alarming thing of all, because dressed as she was, in her obnoxious pajamas and her least attractive glasses, with her hair in two long braids, she looked like Pippi Longstocking on crystal meth. If he was staring at her, it wasn’t because he liked what he saw.

“Thanks again,” she said a little less amiably. “I appreciate it.” When he still made no move to leave, she added, “I’ll see you out.”

Then she turned to make her way back to the front door, completing the journey without looking back once, and was relieved when the delivery guy followed her. But his pace was slow and relaxed, as if he were in no hurry, and somehow that made Avery want to hurry even more. Although his hands were shoved carelessly into the pockets of his jacket, she couldn’t help worrying that there might be something else in those pockets that could be potentially harmful to her. Like, oh…she didn’t know…a gun, perhaps. Or a knife. Some rope, maybe. Or duct tape.

Amazing all the dangerous things that would fit easily into a man’s jacket pocket, she marveled. Though somehow she suspected his hands would be the most dangerous weapon of all.

He was starting to look menacing again, and it occurred to her how truly isolated she was in her life. She didn’t know any of her neighbors and honestly wasn’t sure if any of them would respond to an anguished cry in the night. Not that they’d even hear an anguished cry this time of night, because they were probably all asleep, as normal people were at four-something in the morning.

And if something terrible did happen to her, who would she turn to in the fallout? Avery hadn’t spoken to anyone in her family for nearly a decade, and she didn’t kid herself that something like an assault or molestation on her part would change that. On the contrary, were her person to be violated, it would just make the rest of the family that much more determined to avoid her. The Nesbitts of East Hampton were still trying to rebuild their social standing in the wake of their youngest child’s exploits. She doubted they’d even send flowers to her funeral.

Her mouth went dry at the thought of her funeral. Or maybe it was because her visitor came to a halt in front of her with scarcely a breath of air separating them. If he did decide to be menacing instead of majestic, he could easily overpower her and no one would be the wiser.

Oh, who was she kidding? He could choose to be majestic, too, and she’d still end up a puddle of ruined womanhood at his feet.

Her heart was hammering hard in her chest again, but surprisingly it wasn’t because she felt threatened by him. No, what Avery was feeling was infinitely more dangerous and more potent than fear. What she was feeling was hunger, plain and simple. And it wasn’t for the bags of groceries this guy had just delivered. It was for an altogether different sort of package that he had.

Without thinking, she dropped her gaze to the package in question and saw that his jeans hugged him there as intimately as they did elsewhere. And it was a very nice package indeed. When she realized what she was doing, she snatched her gaze back up again, forcing herself to look at his face. But he was smiling at her in a way that told her he knew exactly what she’d been looking at. Worse, he knew she liked what she saw.

“Thanks again,” she said as she pulled the front door open and moved behind it. But the words came out sounding breathless and needy and in no way grateful.

“Anytime,” he told her as he took a few steps forward. But he halted at the threshold and turned to look at her one last time. Then he lifted a hand to his forehead in something of a salute and smiled at her. “And, sweetheart, I do mean anytime,” he said before leaving.

Avery slammed the door closed behind him with no attempt to be subtle about it, thrusting all four dead bolts into place as quickly as she could and hooking the chain back tight. Then she leaned against it, her arms thrown wide over it, as if her too-slim, one-hundred-and-twenty-pound body could actually hold back two hundred towering pounds of solidly packed male.

Strangely, though, she hadn’t taken those precautions because she feared he might come back and ravish her. It was because she was afraid she’d run after him and beg for it.

SHE SMELLED LIKE PEACHES.

That was the thought circling with the most frequency around Dixon’s brain thirty minutes after meeting Avery Nesbitt in the flesh. Not the fact that her attire was the sort of thing normally worn by people who’d sustained a severe head trauma. Nor that she hadn’t had a qualm about inviting a total stranger into her apartment, never mind that the stranger was carrying groceries she’d ordered—hell, any Tom, Dixon or Harry could have slipped the real delivery boy a Benjamin out on the street and intercepted those groceries to gain entry into her apartment for nefarious purposes. Nor had Dixon been thinking about what a major slob she was. Or about how she’d actually seemed kind of nice, taking pity on the clumsy delivery boy the way she had and cleaning up the guy’s mess.

He wasn’t even thinking most about how, judging by the collection of letters and numbers and symbols he’d seen on her laptop screen, she was trying to take over the world. No, what Dixon was thinking about most was that Avery Nesbitt smelled like peaches.

And, hey, she might not have been trying to take over the entire world. Maybe what she was working on up there was just a sinister little hobby of hers, something she’d keep to herself and not unleash on an unsuspecting planet.

But she was building a monster up there.

And not one of those lame rubber-suited monsters that stomps all over Tokyo, either. No, the beast Avery was building could potentially wipe out life as they knew it from Alaska to Zambia.

Damn, she really was good, he thought as he sat in the darkened van and reviewed the episode in her apartment one more time. And now he could really see why Sorcerer wanted to hook up with her. If not sexually—there was still that small matter of her wardrobe—then certainly in a way that was even more useful to Sorcerer.

Dixon hadn’t been able to see a lot of what was on the laptop before he’d heard her approaching the dining room and knocked the papers to the floor in an effort to hide his snooping. But even the quick glimpse he’d been able to steal had told him a lot. What Avery Nesbitt was doing in the privacy of her own home was something that could potentially have worldwide repercussions. Because Avery Nesbitt was creating a virus. Not some cute little virus that spread from person to person with a simple achoo, but a fast-traveling and highly contagious computer virus that could wipe out any PC it came into contact with.

Even from the little Dixon had seen, there was nothing to rival it. Unless he sat down to dissect and analyze it, he wasn’t sure there would be a cure for it. He’d practically fallen in love with her on the spot, so massive was his admiration for her skill. Until he’d remembered that she was a menace to society, wherein his ardor had quickly cooled.

But it had risen to the fore again during that last odd exchange they’d shared just before he’d left her apartment. Okay, so she wasn’t what any man in his right mind would call beautiful. In those ridiculous pajama bottoms and that shapeless sweatshirt, he hadn’t been able to discern a single feminine attribute. Although she appeared to have a thick, glossy mane of blue-black hair, she’d been wearing it in a style he hadn’t seen on any female over the age of twelve. And she’d seemed to select her glasses frames for the sole purpose of birth control. But the eyes behind those glasses…

Oh, baby.

Huge and round and bluer than the sky above. And hungry. They’d been hungry eyes and they’d raked over Dixon as if he were a surf and turf carried to a death-row inmate the night before her execution. He’d nearly burst into flame when she’d looked at him the way she had. It had been all he could do not to respond to that look, just to see if maybe peaches were as sweet in the dead of winter as they were during the torrid heat of summer. One touch, he’d figured. That was all it would have taken. If he’d touched her one time, the right way, in the right place, Avery Nesbitt would have been his for the night.

Because damn, Dixon was good, too.

He figured she would need at least another day to finish what she was working on, and even then he really did have no evidence to suggest she was planning to put it into circulation. Could be she just had a really bizarre, twisted hobby building computer viruses and then sitting back to admire them.

But he doubted it.

In his experience, people who made viruses only did so for one reason: to send them out into the world and laugh hysterically at all the damage they wrought. And if Avery Nesbitt was involved with Sorcerer, that only made the threat ten times more menacing.

So Dixon had less than a day to find out everything he could about Avery Nesbitt and do whatever he had to do to stop her. He wasn’t going to waste a moment of it hanging around outside her apartment building doing surveillance. Not when he’d learned enough about her tonight to uncover everything about her. But he needed to be at OPUS to do that, with his computer and his networks and his contacts.

He climbed into the front of the van and turned the key and thought again about the peachy scent of Avery Nesbitt. Then he threw the vehicle into gear and drove away. He glanced once into the rearview mirror as he waited for a signal at the corner to change, at the pale blue glow from a computer screen that was barely visible in the window of what he now knew was Avery Nesbitt’s dining room.

She was still at work on her monster. And Dixon was quite possibly the only human being who knew how to stop her.

IT WAS PAST HIS LUNCH hour when he finally took a break, if for no other reason than that he needed to refuel before taking his findings to his superior or he’d get woozy from sheer exhilaration. If Dixon didn’t get a major promotion out of this—to nothing less than Exalted Supreme Sovereign of Every Damned Thing There Is—then there was no justice in the world.

Avery Nesbitt was going to be quite a catch.

And Dixon was going to be the one to catch her.

His head swam with his findings as he blindly selected food from the company cafeteria and paid for it. The headquarters for the Office of Political Unity and Security were in Washington, D.C., but the organization had field offices in a handful of major cities: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Miami. Dixon normally worked out of D.C., but his search for Sorcerer had taken him and his partner She-Wolf to a half-dozen cities in the past year. He was no stranger to New York, though, having earned his master’s degree from Columbia University. Nevertheless, he’d had little opportunity to enjoy himself since his return.

Yeah, he was going to enjoy bringing in Avery Nesbitt for questioning, even if he had to bring her in kicking and screaming.

As he ate his lunch without tasting a bite of it, Dixon connected and divided and reconnected all his discoveries in his brain. She was a fascinating piece of work. But as much as he’d learned about her over the past several hours, he still couldn’t get to the core of her—her motivation. Everybody was motivated by something. Something that had happened to them, or something that they wanted or something that they needed. Motivation defined who a person was. Dixon was no different. He understood his motivation perfectly. But Avery Nesbitt…

He couldn’t figure her out.

There had to be a reason for why she had done the things she’d done and there had to be a reason for why she lived the way she did now—which was an odd way to live indeed. But there was nothing in her background that even hinted at what motivated her. It had only made her that much more intriguing to Dixon.