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manly hand. But it held hers so gently.

    Maybe that was what put her off-kilter. She’d never thought of a man’s hands in terms of gentleness before. On the contrary, men’s hands were not to be trusted.

    Joel continued to hold her free hand as he bent forward to reach for her cuffed one. He had to lean over her body to get to it, and when he did, the V-neck of his T-shirt fell away from his body at eye level. That gave Lila a view of a long, muscular torso and trim waist, all of it naked, and all of it dusted by dark hair. She sucked in an involuntary breath at the sight of such masculine beauty, filling her nose with the scent of him, a scintillating mix of Dial soap, expensive cognac and raw, unmitigated male. Her heartbeat quickened in response, and in an effort to slow it, she turned her gaze to her left hand, which had pulled taut the short chain imprisoning it to the bed. But seeing Joel insert the key into the lock and give it an uneasy twitch only made her pulse skyrocket again.

    Looking away once more, she found herself gazing at his throat, mere inches from her face. And she saw that she wasn’t the only one suffering from a fast, irregular pulse. Joel’s was hammering hard near his collarbone, and she could hear his breathing now, too, coming in short, ragged bursts. Heat pooled in her belly and spread, filling her breasts to bursting and making her damp between her legs.

    My God, she thought, closing her eyes. It was as if they were indulging in some kind of incredibly erotic foreplay. Yet neither had said or done anything to generate this kind of heat. Just the simple act of touching hands and being in close proximity was turning both of them on. What the hell was going on?

    After loosing the cuffs from Lila’s hand and the bedpost, Joel straightened and dropped both cuffs and key back on the nightstand, then retreated to the far side of the room. And if he seemed to make the trip in record time, Lila wasn’t going to mention it. She was just happy to be able to breathe normally again. If one could consider quick, shallow, dizzying gasps to be normal.

    She dropped her recently freed wrist into her other hand and rubbed idly, not so much because she needed to soothe it as she simply needed something to do with her hands that didn’t involve reaching for Joel. But when she looked at him again, he seemed to be watching what she was doing with an inordinate amount of interest. For a second time, something exploded in her belly and seeped into parts of her that were better left alone.

    She did her best to ignore the sensation and return to the topic of their assignment. “Okay, here’s what I know,” she began. But her voice sounded husky and aroused, so she cleared her throat and tried again. “With that bogus attempted-murder charge floating around, I had to stay on the lam for five fuh—uh…for five freaking months,” she quickly amended.

    Her language had appalled her sister, Marnie, that single evening the two of them had spent together getting caught up after being separated for virtually their entire lives. Only then had Lila realized just how rough her vocabulary was, compared to that of polite—i.e., non-OPUS—society. But she’d spent her childhood in a trailer park among neighbors who were, at best, bikers and, at worst, junkies, her adolescence on the streets of Las Vegas and her adult life in the company of spies and thugs. Language was a weapon in such environments, and Lila had simply adopted the behavior she saw practiced around her. Once she’d realized how uncomfortable it made Marnie, however, she’d done her best to gentle her vocabulary and deep-six the profanity. Even outside Marnie’s presence, Lila still tried to watch what she said and how brazenly she said it. Such was the good influence her sister had already brought to her life.

    “During the five months I was lying low,” she began again, “I learned a lot of stuff about Sorcerer on my own. Stuff that I