Free Dreamwalker by Kathleen Dante Page B

who could’ve done it.”
    “Except you.”
    Her Adonis shook his head. “This isn’t my usual gig. I was brought in much later. But from what I’d heard, the team was chasing ghosts, building a file full of negative results.”
    With his talent for tripping through a person’s dreams, Rory had to wonder what his “usual gig” was, but that was irrelevant to the discussion. Needing to shield her thoughts from his scrutiny, she broke eye contact, dropping her gaze to the pale dessert between them. One thing was for certain: it didn’t sound boring. “Okay, from an arms dealer in Kosovo. Why should I?”
    “I’m authorized to offer you three million dollars, half up front, for your services.” The Fed’s abs tightened into a mouthwatering display of washboard ripples in her peripheral vision, momentarily distracting her from their conversation.
    “Really now? In exchange for risking life and limb?” Smirking, she used her fork to doodle on the custard’s surface, while her mind raced. Swipe a nuke from under the noses of terrorists? The challenge made her heart leap and gave her the shivers. “That’s a paltry figure. Isn’t the going rate rather higher?”
    “You won’t be working alone.”
    Rory looked up in surprise, her gaze immediately caught by his dark stare. “Oh?”
    “I’ll be with you.”
    “And that’s supposed to be better . . . how?” She fed herself some custard, deliberately making a show of sucking the fork’s tines clean. By the flicker of his eyes, it hadn’t gone unnoticed. Good. She needed every advantage she could get.
    He snorted, his nostrils flaring attractively. And, man, was she in trouble if she noticed that! “How much?”
    The waves lapped against the beach while she debated how safe it would be to answer. Her Adonis hadn’t asked her any incriminating questions, hadn’t even fished for details after that one reference to the Peć job. “Seven and a half, U.S., five up front, and I’ll consider it.”
    “I’ll have to get authorization.”
    “You do that.” Setting her fork on the plate with a gentle clink, Rory stood up, wanting to be the one who ended the discussion. She suspected the Fed could gain the upper hand, if she wasn’t careful.
    Her womb clenched, her folds growing moist at the memory of having him above her last night, thick and hard and desperate, grinding her into the grass as he pumped her. She steeled her spine against the temptation to make an exception in his case. Just because there were exceptions to every rule didn’t mean he had to be one of them.
    Surprisingly, he let her walk away without protest, not even trying to trail her. Or maybe not so surprising, if he could enter her dreams any time he wanted.
    It did prick Rory’s feminine pride that he hadn’t tried to convince her to stay longer, after she’d gone to the effort of Changing into a voluptuous beach bunny. After last night on the rooftop, she’d half expected to spend the rest of the afternoon performing acts of indecency on the beach.
    Returning to her hotel room, Rory channel surfed until she found a show that she could stand hearing in the background, more as a habit than some vague suspicion that her room was bugged. Medical dramas were her show of choice, catering to her taste for the forbidden and the unknown. As a lamia, normal human physiology fascinated her.
    Keeping a low profile meant diScipios never went to hospitals or consulted a medical professional who wasn’t family, which made them a point of acute interest. The risk of discovery, however, was too much to allow, so she fed her prurience through TV whenever she could; though she did wonder if the shows reflected reality more accurately than the episodes of Mission Impossible .
    With medical jargon as comfort noise, she went online and sent out electronic feelers, researching her Adonis and his challenge the same way she would any other commission.
    “Damon. Damon Venizélos.” Rory rolled his name in