* * * * * * * *
-three months later-
When the door opened she glared at him, daring him to make just one smart-ass comment. Just one. And she’d rip his pretty blond head right off his shoulders. She knew that she was a sight. She was dripping wet from her tangled hair to the soles of her bare feet and she didn’t even want to think about what the water had done to her dress. He pursed his lips -no doubt struggling to suppress the smirk- and stepped aside with a flourish of his arm to usher her into his hotel room.
“To what do I owe this dubious honor, Agent Bristow?” Sark asked as she stomped across the threshold.
“You know damn well what you owe it to, Marty,” she snapped. “You deliberately tipped off those guards that I was there.”
“You would have done… In fact, you have done the same thing to me. Several times.”
“I have cable burns on my hand because of you,” she continued irritably, waving the offended member at him.
“I’m sorry.” His grin was beginning to show. “Did one of us switch sides and I somehow failed to notice?”
“I broke a heel and twisted my ankle.”
“We aren’t allies, you know.”
“I had to swim in the Seine!”
“So I deduced. How ever did you get past the concierge looking like that?”
“You used my toothbrush!”
He blinked at her. Then the grin widened. Turned into a snort. A chuckle. It was a full-blown laugh by the time she stomped into the bathroom and slammed the door.
Maybe this hadn’t been the most well-thought-out plan of all time, she admitted as she scowled at herself in the floor-to-ceiling mirror. But it was the first thing that had come to mind when she’d crawled out of that disgusting river onto the wrong bank at the wrong end of the city. She was not about to hitchhike all the way back across Paris looking like a drowned rat just to spend the night in that flea-trap hotel with cockroaches the size of small Buicks. Not when the cocky bastard who was responsible for her predicament was currently ensconced in one of the classiest hotels in town.
Damn. Her reflection widened its eyes in belated comprehension and horror. She’d walked right into it. He had taunted her at the embassy where they’d crossed paths just a few hours ago. He’d teased her about her civil servant accommodations while boasting of his own five-star lodgings. Then he’d pocketed the files that she’d been sent to retrieve, ducked out of the office, and sent the goons in after her.
He couldn’t have known what she would have to do to evade capture. He couldn’t possibly have predicted that she’d be forced to dive into the Seine to escape or that her moonlight swim would wash her up mere blocks from his hotel. But he’d planted the damn seed and when she had seen the glowing sign, she had known he was there. That, apparently, was when the irrationality had set in. She had suffered a bout of momentary insanity that had carried her up the street, through the back alley, up the service elevator, and to his door.
He owed her, damn it.
And this was a really nice bathroom.
It was nearly as big as the entire hotel room she’d had the night he’d barged in on her. The vast expanse of sparkling white tile made her feel even grimier than ever and the enormous mirror hid nothing. Her hair desperately needed washing. There was a smudge of something across her forehead that she didn’t want to identify. And her dress was absolutely ruined. She picked dispiritedly at the stained fabric and tugged futilely on the sodden tie-fastener at the base of her neck.
“Does this mean you’ve reconsidered my offer of employment?” he asked through the door. There was still a snicker in his voice.
“No, it does not.” There was no way she was going to be able to unravel the wet string.
“Do you want some help with that knot?” Oh, he just had to go and be Mr. Observant, didn’t he?
“No.”
“Allow me to rephrase the question. Do you need some help with it?”
“No.” Her scowl deepened at his renewed laughter. His shaving kit was on the counter and she began to dig through it. She briefly considered flushing his toothbrush but decided that would be childish and pulled out his razor instead. She brandished it at him when he opened the door.
“Don’t be so stubborn,” he said. “You’re just going to dull the blade that way. Turn around.”
“Right,” she replied, eyeing the knife in his hand warily. He sighed.
“I’ve already done all the damage I intend to do today. Now turn around. Unless you’d prefer to wear that rag, in which case I’ll be more than happy to arrange for your cab back to your own hotel. You can’t stay here if you insist on remaining in that… garment.” He wrinkled his nose. “To be honest, Agent Bristow, it reeks.”
Much as she hated to admit it, he had a point. She sighed in resignation and piled her hair on top of her head as she turned. She tried not to flinch as he touched her bare back. His hand was startlingly warm against her cold skin. He grinned at her in the mirror and she failed to resist making a face at him. He cut the tie with a deft flick of the knife, never once looking away from her gaze.
“My bathroom is your bathroom,” he said as he stepped away from her. “Make yourself at home.”
She slammed the door on him again and locked it - for all the good she knew that would do. A hotel bathroom door lock. He could probably pick it with his thumbnail without even thinking about it. Deciding to trust for the moment, however, that he would mind his manners, she peeled off her wet clothes and left them in a soggy puddle as she stepped into the shower.
The hot water was wonderfully soothing. She took great pleasure in unwrapping the French soap and breaking the seals on all of the bottles of shampoo. When she was satisfied that all of the river filth and street grime had been scrubbed off, she simply stood luxuriating in the clean spray that pounded her shoulders. Her hand still stung where the cable had sliced it and her ankle was still throbbing. With the twist of a few knobs, Sydney turned the shower into a bath.
She could stay in here all night, she thought as she eased into the slowly rising water. A little more experimenting with the knobs started a gentle bubbling from the jets built into the sides of the oversized tub. There were two more containers on the small ledge beside her - bath beads and crystals. After a very brief deliberation, she dumped a handful of each into the water. As she was setting the canisters back on the shelf she noticed that her clothes were no longer in a heap on the floor.
“Sark!” Realizing that shouting at him would probably prompt a response, she tugged the shower curtain nearly closed again. The door opened slightly and he met her glare in the mirror. “Where are my clothes?”
“Being burned, if my instructions are being followed precisely,” he said. “You weren’t actually intending to put them on again, were you?”
“What am I supposed to wear now?” She was exasperated to see him grin wickedly.
“There’s a bathrobe on the back of the door, dear.”
To her chagrin, he was right. A big, fluffy white bathrobe. It had probably been there the whole time. She hated him. She really did. He closed the door again before she could reach the soap to throw at him. When her fingers and toes had completely turned to prunes she finally climbed out of the tub and put on the robe. She wrapped a towel around her head and walked out to face her not-as-reluctant-as-he-ought-to-be temporary benefactor.
The room was bigger than she’d noticed at first glance. She’d been a little preoccupied when she had stomped through it earlier. Sark was seated at a table on the far side of the suite, typing industriously at a laptop. He was still wearing the same clothes he’d worn at the embassy, minus the jacket and tie. The sleeves of his white button-down were rolled up and the buttons were undone to reveal the t-shirt beneath. He glanced up, ran an appraising gaze over her, and smirked before turning his attention back to the screen. Damned if everything she did didn’t just seem to amuse the hell out of him. She stalked across the room and dropped into the chair across from him.
“Coffee?” she asked hopefully as she noticed the mug sitting beside his computer.
“Tea,” he corrected with a stern frown. “Do you know how bad for you coffee is? Twenty-nine different kinds of acids, tars, and other charmingly carcinogenic substances. Ten grams of caffeine can be lethal.”
“Given the lives we lead, Marty, I really don’t think it’s the caffeine that’s going to kill us.”
“Will you stop calling me that if I admit that I made it up?”
“It wouldn’t irritate you nearly so much if it wasn’t your real name,” she smiled at him sweetly. “So just how sick were you to actually tell me that?”
“Sicker than I’d realized apparently,” he muttered. She laughed.
“So there’s no coffee?”
“No coffee.”
“Not even decaf?”
“They scrub out the caffeine with methylene chloride.”
“No coffee at all?”
“None,” he said. “Three different kinds of tea though.”
“You are such a Brit.”
“Early indoctrination can be a bit difficult to overcome,” he admitted with a grin. “Why are you here, Sydney?”
She shrugged as she rose to pour herself a cup of tea. “You owe me.”
“That’s it?”
“What? You can show up at my door for absolutely no reason whatsoever and I need a brilliant excuse?”
“Well, yes,” he grinned. “I’m generally not accountable to anyone else about my personal life. You, I suspect, could be court-martialed for socializing with me.”
“They don’t court-martial civilians and we are not socializing. You are repaying a debt. And you think that my mother wouldn’t be curious to know why you came to me a few months ago?”
“I think that both of your parents are downright terrifying. Would you care to explain to either of them why you came to me tonight? What about Dixon? Isn’t your partner going to be concerned?”
“Solo op,” she shrugged again. “Nobody cares where I am tonight. Tomorrow though… I don’t suppose I could talk you out of those files?”
“No, you couldn’t talk me out of them,” he smirked. “But you’re welcome to try other methods of persuasion.”
“In your dreams, Marty.” She rolled her eyes but was surprised to catch a peculiar flicker in his expression. His smile had become oddly pensive.
“You know your mother kept surveillance on you as you were growing up,” he said slowly. “I saw my first photos of you when I was fifteen. You were in college then, I think.”
She stared at him blankly for a moment as she tried to follow his train of thought. She knew that he couldn’t be implying what it sounded like he was implying. A knock at the door startled her and his expression suddenly shifted back to its more familiar grin.
“That would be for you, I imagine,” he said, chuckling at her bemusement. When he returned from answering the door he handed her a small package. “I requested that they find you something suitable based on the sizes of the clothing to be burned. It appears that, so far, undergarments are all they’ve managed to locate. There aren’t that many stores open this late.”
“I’ll bet. So I’m supposed to sleep in a bathrobe?”
“If you’re very nice I might let you have my last clean shirt.”
“If I promise not to kill you in your sleep you can hand it over right now.”
“Negotiations with you are always so entertaining,” he relented, pulling the shirt out of the closet.
Sydney retreated to the bathroom once again. To her surprise and relief, the underwear was tastefully modest and fit perfectly. The shirt was much too large, of course, but surprisingly softer than she had expected. So was Sark’s expression when she reemerged.
“I think I like that on you better than the dress.”
“Before or after it was ruined because of you?”
“Either.”
She snorted at him. “It was a designer original. Do you have any idea how much it cost?”
“It was just a dress,” he shrugged. “But that… That’s my shirt.” The look he gave her was curiously proprietary for an instant before he laughed softly to himself. “Goodnight, Sydney. Mi cama es su cama.” He nodded toward the bed then turned back to the laptop.
She watched him for a little longer but he appeared to have no intention of going to bed himself. She gave a mental shrug and crawled between the sheets. Their thread-count was at least a hundred higher than what she could have expected at her own hotel. She wondered what Kendall would say if she asked for an expense account that would cover something like this on her next mission. She hadn’t realized just how tired she was until she lay down. As she tried to doze off she also realized that Sark’s quiet tapping at the keyboard wasn’t nearly as soothing as his breathing had once been. After twenty minutes she sat up.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” she asked. And immediately regretted it as he glanced up at her and grinned.
“Are you asking me to come to bed, Agent Bristow?”
“That light is annoying,” she groused.
“All you have to do is ask me to turn it off.”
“Stay up all night if you want to, Marty.”
“I’ll do whatever you want if you’ll just stop calling me that,” he said as she pulled the blanket over her head.
Sometime later she discovered that he hadn’t stayed up all night after all. The bed was large but the two of them seemed to be attempting to occupy the same two-foot-wide swath of it. Her head rested on his chest and she could feel his heartbeat. She could also feel one of his hands tangled in her hair and the other resting on the small of her back. She was briefly disoriented by the discrepancy between the soft cotton beneath her cheek and the bare skin beneath her hand, but soon realized it was because her hand was under his t-shirt. She tried to withdraw it without disturbing him, but he entirely misinterpreted the motion. As her fingers slid lightly across his skin, his arms tightened reflexively, making it all but impossible for her to move.
“Cold hands, Syd,” he muttered as she froze. He stirred restlessly for a moment, settled her more comfortably against him, and subsided once again.
It wasn’t until she was certain his steady breathing meant he was still asleep that Sydney realized she’d been holding her own breath. It really was a shame that he was such an amoral bastard, she thought as she exhaled slowly and relaxed. Her fingers absently traced a thin scar they’d found along his lower ribs as she felt his hand burrow deeper into her hair. How was it that she could feel so at ease in the arms of a sociopath?
Maybe it was because she couldn’t think of anyone scarier. If the toughest opponent she knew could hold her so protectively -even if he was asleep and snoring ever so slightly- what could she possibly have to fear from anything else? Her last conscious thought before drifting off again was that it was very, very wrong to be so content under such ridiculous circumstances.
Two hours later she was astonished to see that he was still there. They lay nose to nose now and she stared into a pair of blurry blue eyes.
“It’s my hotel room,” he pointed out, apparently interpreting her shocked expression with ease. “That means you're the one required to flee at dawn.”
“Is that what you did last time? Run away?”
“I had a plane to catch.” His smile was still sleepy, but there was a growing alertness in his eyes. “You didn’t want me to stay, did you?”
“You could have at least left me the cough syrup. I had a head cold for a week and a half after that thanks to you.”
“Everything is always my fault,” he sighed, blinking at her so innocently that she had to smile. He looked so indolent that she was completely taken by surprise when he suddenly crossed the space between them and kissed her.
The move was so unexpected that her body responded before her mind could sort it all out. He didn’t taste like cough medicine, she thought inanely as the kiss deepened. When her brain caught up with the situation she pushed him away and sat up. He stared up at her as if he wasn’t quite certain what had possessed him to do something so bizarre either. Then he gave her a slow grin.
“Feel free to use my toothbrush,” he said. “You’ve been everywhere it has now.”
She threw the pillow at him as she climbed out of bed and stormed into the bathroom. When she saw the brand-new plastic-wrapped toothbrush sitting next to the sink she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Or storm back out and shove it down his throat sideways. Her new dress was hanging on the back of the door and there was a box containing a pair of sandals on the cabinet.
When she reemerged fully dressed, Sark was still in bed. He appeared to be asleep again but when she approached he opened his eyes.
“We’re even now,” she told him. He gave her a crooked grin.
“You don’t really have to leave.”
“We’re not allies.”
“We could be.”
“Not in this lifetime, Marty.”
“What do I have to do to at least negotiate that up to a ‘Martin’?”
“Stop screwing up my missions. Quit giving me colds. Stop making my life so difficult.”
“What if I just start calling you ‘Syd’ instead?”
She laughed softly and shook her head. She didn’t look back as she left.
* * * *