An Act of Persuasion

chapterR FIVE



MARK SHARPE GLANCED up at the sound of the office door opening. He’d taken a small but expensive two-room office in Liberty One, Philadelphia’s second-tallest building since the completion of the Comcast building. With the glass wall between his office and his assistant’s desk, he could see and hear everything in the space he occupied, which soothed his always alert senses.

As a former CIA agent, there were some habits he knew he would never be able to break and being completely aware of his surroundings at all times was one of them.

Anna walked in and set her purse on her desk. Her shoulders were slumped, her face was pale and there were circles under her eyes. She wore a particularly cheerful sundress that did nothing to alter the impression that she wasn’t a happy person.

Damn Ben. Mark had expected more from him.

Pushing away from his desk he walked out to greet her.

“So how did the big reveal go?” he asked.

She’d told him on Friday about the party for her former coworker, and her intention to come clean with Ben. Looking at her face, Mark was pretty certain he knew the answer. Ben might have been a brilliant spy, but when it came to interpersonal relationships, the guy was a wash.

Mark had known Anna now for only eight weeks, and known about the pregnancy that whole time. She was probably the only woman alive who would announce during an interview that she was pregnant—it wouldn’t occur to her to keep that fact a secret until after she landed the job. Not that it mattered. His goal was to have Anna working for him, pregnant or not.

In those eight weeks he’d never once seen her look so...depleted. Even with the morning sickness there was always a vibrancy about her that never waned.

At least not until today.

“He wants to marry me.”

Huh. Okay, maybe Ben had come up to snuff. That proposal wasn’t completely unexpected. Ben had always been a do-the-right-thing kind of a guy and when you knocked up a girl, the right thing was to propose.

It’s what Mark had done all those years ago. He would always be thankful Helen had the foresight to not take him up on his offer.

Helen. It was an ache that still hurt when he thought of her. The girl he’d known was now dead and, although she never would have believed he was capable of it, he grieved for her. Deeply.

With a huff, Anna slumped in her chair. “Can you believe he did that?”

“Yes. You know Ben. What did you think he was going to do?”

“The right thing by the kid.”

“But not the right thing by you?”

She scowled at him. “What is this? The nineteen hundreds? Do I look like I can’t handle this on my own?”

Immediately, he backed off. After all, it wasn’t exactly like he was on Ben’s side in this situation. The man had been Mark’s rival for more years than he cared to admit. The aggravating part of the rivalry was that he didn’t think Ben reciprocated it.

And why should he? The man had always been one step ahead of him. Mark used Ben as a benchmark as he made his climb up the ladder within the ranks of the agency. Mark pushed himself as hard as he could to catch up to the man who had beaten him into the service by three years.

Only, he never did. Somehow Ben was always a grade higher and always a step ahead on the job. So like any man embittered with constant defeat at the hands of a self-appointed rival, Mark competed in the one area where he knew he could get even—seduction.

If Ben was interested in a woman, that woman became Mark’s next conquest. And he was sure to beat Ben every time. The man was atrocious at the art of seducing a woman. The concept of flirting was no doubt alien to him.

Yet, while Ben’s interest in a particular member of the fairer might have been piqued from time to time—enough for him to even pursue a sexual relationship—it never held for long.

So, really, what did it matter that Mark repeatedly got the girl when he knew Ben never really cared one way or the other.

Except not this girl, Mark thought, looking at Anna. She meant something to Ben. Strange, because he would have thought she was way too young for Ben. He had to be nearing forty-five and Anna was only twenty-eight. But Mark could see she was older than her years—no doubt the effect of having been abandoned then spending most of her childhood in various foster homes. She would probably be annoyed that he knew her history since it wasn’t something she’d offered up during her interview, but collecting information on people was simply his nature.

He hadn’t yet managed to discover exactly what had happened between her and Ben. Something obviously had—the woman was pregnant, after all. But that something should have been an absolute showstopper for Ben. The guy had always avoided any personal connection with people who worked for him.

Mark spent years in various assignments reporting to Ben and watching female agent after female agent try to engage him in a sexual relationship. Some, Mark imagined, did so because they were actually attracted to Ben. More did so because they thought sleeping with a spymaster was a pretty cool notch to have in their belt. And every single one of them did so because Ben was a big fat walking challenge.

But he didn’t mess around with agents assigned to him. Period. It was a rule he’d never broken, as far as Mark knew.

Only he’d broken it with Anna in a hell of a big way. Maybe it had to do with the whole almost-dying thing. But it was hard to imagine Ben reacting to death that way. Not when Mark had seen Ben, on more than one occasion, confront it head-on. The man was fearless. Mark didn’t see cancer changing that.

Someday he would get the story from Anna. Ferreting information from reluctant sources was a particular gift of his. Given that she was his employee, he had all the time in the world to work on her. Eventually she would cave.

Of course, as soon as Ben found out that Mark was in Philadelphia and that she was working for him things were going to get a lot more interesting.

Ben might suspect Mark was up to his old tricks and had moved here solely for the purpose of continuing the competition. My business against yours, let’s see who can make the most money kind of a thing.

Maybe that was true to a certain extent. Mark still liked to needle Ben any time he had a chance. Plus aspiring to Ben’s level of success was great professional motivation. Mark had done his due diligence as soon as he arrived. He knew what the Tyler Group was, knew Ben’s reputation around town and had pretty extensive background information on every single person working for the Group. It was only natural. Two former clandestine operators living in the same city, hell yes they were going to know what the other was up to. It was simply how they were programmed.

And when Mark’s routine searches into Ben’s employees turned up a résumé on a job search site from one Anna Summers, he knew he’d hit pay dirt. The ultimate steal. Anna wasn’t just some woman Ben showed interest in, she had been his trusted assistant for six years. Six years. As far as Mark knew this was the most committed and long-term relationship Ben had ever had with a woman besides his mother.

But as intriguing as competing with Ben in the private sector might be, the reality was Mark had much more personal reasons for making Philadelphia his home.

Helen’s death had decided everything.

“He knows I’m working for you.” Anna’s announcement brought Mark back to the present.

He grimaced, recognizing how futile the hope to keep his presence in the city under wraps awhile longer had been. “How did he find out?”

“I told him.” She said it as if she didn’t understand why he might care.

It figured Anna would confess. She was too bone-deep loyal to not be up front with the fact that she was working for the man who confessed to be Ben’s competition. Mark had liked having the upper hand for a time, had liked being in the city covertly, but now that was over.

Since hanging up his private investigator shingle, Mark had solved a few small-profile cases, but nothing that would have registered enough attention to attract Ben’s notice. Now that notice would be notched up to full-alert mode. “I’ll go out on a limb and say he wasn’t happy to learn you’re working for me.”

One didn’t need to be a good detective to know how Ben would react to the news that Anna was now in Mark’s clutches...employment.

“Correct. He insisted I quit and said you were dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” It was silly, but the idea that Ben considered him enough of a threat to call him dangerous was flattering. Someday, Mark would really need to let Ben know what their rivalry was all about. Then he would see that Mark wasn’t the enemy. Mark actually respected the hell out of his old section chief. Ben was the guy Mark wanted to be when he grew up. If he ever did.

But he didn’t plan on sharing that information anytime soon. At least not until after he’d watched Ben go crazy with the idea that Anna worked for Mark.

“This was yesterday?” he asked.

“No, the night before at the party.”

Surprising, he hadn’t already heard from Ben. Maybe because he had a few other things on his mind right now. Like being told he was about to become a daddy. It was enough to shake any man up.

Which meant he’d seek out Mark today.

Home or workplace?

Workplace, Mark concluded. Kept things less personal.

During the day or after work?

After work. After Anna had left because Ben wouldn’t want her to see him confronting Mark directly. Hell, Ben was probably scouting the building now.

First he would figure out where Mark had rented office space. Child’s play for a professional of Ben’s caliber. Then he would locate the building and determine the layout of the parking garage. Posing as someone interested in renting an office, he would ask at the security desk in the lobby if parking spaces were reserved for leaseholders or open to the general public.

He would learn that only a few select spots were marked for the executives in some of the higher-rent offices. Which meant he would spend some time finding Anna’s car amongst the five parking levels beneath the building. Once he found it, he would tag it with an electronic device to monitor her movements and alert him when she’d left the building. Or, if performing such an act as a civilian left him feeling squeamish with guilt, Ben would simply locate a discreet place from which he could watch her car unseen and wait for her to drive away.

He would—correctly—assume that Mark would remain in his office after normal business hours, because he knew the only thing Mark ever cared about was his job and he dedicated nearly every waking moment to it. Starting a new business would only make his work ethic even more stringent.

None of this Mark would share with Anna, of course. No, this was just a little game between former spies. Still, he wondered...how well did she know Ben? She had been with him for six years, after all.

“He’ll come for you, you know. Probably tonight after I leave,” she said matter-of-factly.

Yeah, his Anna was no fool. “Yep, he will. Worried he might sway me and I’ll fire you?”

“You would fire a poor pregnant woman who needs a salary so she can raise a child on her own?”

“In a heartbeat. Didn’t Ben tell you? I’m ruthless as well as dangerous.”

She smiled, knowing he was teasing and he was glad to see it. Glad that he’d made it happen. Anna was a good woman. He’d known it the first time he met her. She was grounded and level-headed and would be cool in a high-pressure situation. There was a steadiness about her that probably should have been washed away by the years she’d spent in uncertain situations as a child. It hadn’t been. She was rock solid and would have made a good operative or soldier. For his sake and Ben’s, Mark was glad she was neither.

No, he imagined it wouldn’t be hard at all to spend a lifetime trying to make her smile. But, as was his pattern, Ben had gotten there first. This was Mark’s bad luck.

“So what are you going to do?” he asked.

“Uh...I was thinking of working for the rest of the day with periodic time-outs to eat saltines and drink ginger ale.”

“I meant about Ben. He proposed, remember?”

“And I said no. Actually I said hell no. He was pissed but he’ll get over it. When he calms down we can discuss our situation like rational people. Marriage isn’t the answer.”

If Mark’s gut was right, he didn’t think that rational discussion would happen. Not because Ben wasn’t rational, but because he’d broken his number-one rule and slept with his employee. For a man like him that was like a tectonic shift in his principles. And he would be immovable until he got the results he wanted. In this case, Mark suspected the results were marriage.

And that came back to Mark’s original assessment. Something about Anna was different for Ben. Given how sad she looked when she came into the office after having been proposed to, it didn’t take a professional observer to know how she felt about Ben in return.

Mark shrugged. None of it should be his concern. He’d hired Anna simply to piss off Ben, but he’d quickly grown to like her. Now, because of that, it seemed terribly important to him how all this worked out. Which, he realized, was nothing more than a stall tactic on his part from having to make the most important decision of his life.

Yes, Ben had beaten him to the punch in a lot of different areas in his life. But the one thing Mark had done first was father a child.

* * *

BEN WATCHED as Anna drove out of the parking garage into downtown Philadelphia traffic. He waited until she’d turned right at the first corner and was out of sight before he exited his car.

He entered the building he’d been in earlier that day gathering information. He stopped at the security desk briefly and flashed the badge he’d spent the afternoon forging before making his way to the elevators. He hit the button for the appropriate floor and felt a surge in his stomach as the sleek elevator climbed the distance so fast he could actually feel pressure against his eardrums.

Leave it to Mark to pick a flashy office. By contrast, Ben and his staff used a small, serviceable office in the Northern Liberties section of the city. Results were what mattered, not a slick image.

Once the elevator stopped, he made his way down the hall and wasn’t surprised to see Mark lounging in the doorway that opened to his office. So casually as if to suggest he could predict Ben’s actions and knew he would be arriving.

“Sharpe,” Ben said, acknowledging him.

“Tyler,” Mark replied, sporting his legendary smile.

Women went crazy for that smile. Hardened female foreign agents revealed secret information because of that smile. All Ben ever wanted to do was punch it.

Mark stepped back and allowed Ben to enter. He passed Anna’s desk—had to be hers because there was a small potted plant on the corner of it. She hated planting and hated having to remember to water them even more, yet held firmly to the belief that an office needed real life in it. Not plastic decorations.

He made his way past the glass partition to the larger space and sat in one of the two guest chairs available and waited for Mark to take his seat behind the desk. He would like the position of authority it gave him, Ben knew.

Mark sat in his high-back leather chair, knotted his fingers together and waited. It was a power play, keeping silent so Ben would speak first and state his purpose for showing up. Silence was better than asking a question that could potentially deliver an answer you weren’t prepared for. He couldn’t necessarily blame the man for the ploy. After all they both knew why he was here. And this was Ben’s move.

“You’re going to let her go.”

“Let her go?” Mark affected a confused expression. “If you mean as my employee, then, no, I’m not. If you mean it in another way...”

Ben knew Mark was toying with him. Using the one advantage he’d always had over him—his ability to seduce women. The interesting thing was Mark was hardly a Casanova. He was much too focused on his work to ever devote a lot of time to seducing women.

But when he did want a woman he made that a priority. The fact that he always seemed to want the women Ben showed interest in was no coincidence.

This situation, however, was different. Ben was confident Mark’s attention to Anna wasn’t sexual. Or if it was, there hadn’t been time for him to act on it. Not with all Anna had going on recently with Ben’s weeks of quarantine, finding another job and coming to terms with being pregnant.

At least he hoped so.

“Bullshit.”

Mark shrugged and obviously wasn’t willing to lie beyond what he’d already alluded to.

“What the hell are you doing here anyway?” Ben asked. “Shouldn’t you be the new section chief in Afghanistan?”

Initially he’d been annoyed he hadn’t been aware of Mark’s presence in the city—it wasn’t until Anna had announced who she was working for that Ben had known. A former agent, moving into his territory. It should have shown up somewhere on his radar. No allowances for the fact that he’d been quarantined in a sterile room at the hospital while Mark set up shop.

“I quit. Just like you did.”

Ben had left the agency when the politics started to matter more than the results. There were days he’d felt the entire agency was a tool being used solely for the administration’s end game. Instead of uncovering information, they were manufacturing it—something he was not willing to be a part of. Unfortunately, the higher up in the ranks he was promoted, the closer he got to the bullshit that was D.C. It was either leave or have his career stall at the same level, watching less talented but more politically savvy agents advance ahead of him.

“Like I did?” He thought Mark would have been one of those more politically savvy agents.

“Stevens got promoted to section chief.”

Then again, obviously not. Stevens’s quality of work left a lot to be desired—a fact overlooked by the key decision-makers he networked with. “You were better than him.”

“Yes, I was. But you know that doesn’t always matter.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“After you left the fun of trying to one-up you was gone and my ambition seemed to tank with it. I couldn’t deal with the politics any more than you could. Watching men and women who cared more about furthering their careers than getting the job done was driving me mad. I discovered I wasn’t willing to play and so I got skipped over. Then some other things in my life changed and that was a sign that it was time to get out of the game. The fact that I made the transition so easily tells me I already had one foot out the door.”

“Really, you’re finding the...transition...easy?” Ben hadn’t. It had taken him nearly a full year to stop looking over his shoulder every other second. Now, he did it only every other minute. So far in the six years he’d been out no one had ever been behind him.

“I’m...adjusting.”

“Why here? Why Philadelphia?”

“I have my reasons,” Mark said. His attention seemed to wander momentarily before he refocused on Ben. “They weren’t all about you.”

Ben believed him. In a strange way, as much as Mark had always annoyed him with his antics, it felt right to be sitting here with someone who had lived the same life he had, who had seen the same things and knew the same information. Like he was finally connected to someone again.

He hadn’t felt like this since...Anna.

The reason he was here.

“She’s pregnant with my child.”

Mark didn’t flinch from the sudden shift in the conversation. “I know. She told me when I interviewed her. You want to talk about how you let that happen with an employee?”

“You knew she was pregnant and you still hired her?” Ben asked, ignoring the other comment.

“I’ll take that as a no, you don’t want to talk about how it happened. Okay, fine. Why did I hire her? Ben, you know it would be discrimination if I held her pregnancy against her. Besides, she could have come to me and said she had two months to live and I still would have hired her. She was your trusted assistant for six years. Which means she’s completely and utterly capable. You wouldn’t have kept her around for so long if she wasn’t.”

“What do you have her doing?”

“Right now setting up the office. Placing ads in appropriate print media and online, setting up a computer system for billing and a fair amount of researching on the cases I currently have.”

“She said you specialize in cold cases.”

“I do. I have no intention of spending my days photographing cheating spouses. I’m fortunate enough to have saved quite a bit of money during my years abroad so I can select only the cases I want. Which means criminal cases most likely. And I like challenges, so the older the case, the bigger the challenge.”

“You said right now. What are your plans for her in the future, if she chooses to stay with you?”

“You mean, if she doesn’t return to work for you? Do you really see that as a possibility?”

No, Ben didn’t. Regardless of what happened regarding her job here, he doubted she would ever agree to work for him again. They were beyond that now. Trying to blend their relationship as both parents and coworkers would be too complicated. In one area they had to be equals, in the other area they wouldn’t be.

Besides, that’s not what he wanted. His thoughts on having sex with his employees hadn’t changed. His thoughts on having sex with Anna had. He wanted her. So he had to let her go professionally. If she had to leave his company and work for someone else, he could think of worse things than it being someone he knew and ultimately trusted. As long as he knew what her responsibilities would be.

“What are your plans going forward for her?” Ben asked, again refusing to answer Mark’s question.

“She has aspirations to be an investigator. I’m going to train her, help her get her license and give her cases to work.”

Ben crossed his right leg over his left and smoothed out the material of his pants. “The hell you are.”

“She’s got a knack for research.”

“She will not be investigating criminal cases. Cold or hot.”

Mark smiled. That blasted smile that had Ben’s knuckles itching to remove it from his face. “You really don’t have any say over that, do you?”

“Maybe not, but I can make sure she knows the type of man she’s working for. A man who doesn’t see a problem putting other people at risk for his own ends.”

“You’re never going to get over that, are you? No one forced you out of that helicopter. That was your choice.”

There had been an assault on a suspected al Qaeda leader’s home. Mark had done most of the work gathering the intel and wanted to be with the SEAL team when they raided the property despite Ben’s protestations. The agency’s job was to collect the information, pass it over and let the military do the work. However, in this instance, the team hadn’t been opposed to having Mark with them in the helicopter to provide specific detail about the small complex before they attacked. Ben had accompanied them to oversee his operative.

A good thing he had, too, because not a minute after the team deployed, Mark broke protocol and followed the SEALs onto the ground.

“It wasn’t a choice. You were being fired upon.”

“Yeah, good old Ben to the rescue. Because there was no chance I would have made it out of the situation on my own like I had countless times before.”

As far as Ben was concerned, he wouldn’t have. “I’m not here to rehash the past. I’m here to tell you how it’s going to be with Anna. Beyond any history you and I have, she’s carrying my child. I will not let you put her in harm’s way.”

“I’m putting her in harm’s way? You knocked her up. You didn’t even know about it until a few days ago. Tell me, Ben, which one of us is the bigger jerk in this scenario.”

The accusation hit Ben directly in the gut. What was worse, he couldn’t refute it. “My relationship with Anna is none of your concern.”

“And my relationship with her and her future career here is none of your concern. I can tell you this, she’s one stubborn girl. That’s easy enough to see. Push her to quit this job and you’ll only be playing into my hands.”

Ben waited a beat until the rush of anger he felt subsided. “You’ve known her eight weeks. I’ve known her six years.”

“But you know I’m right.”

He did. He also knew that Mark Sharpe was a risk taker and, as he said, the bigger the challenge the bigger the high for him. She would be taking on cases that involved potentially dangerous people and the idea of her out there alone, unprotected by Ben, sent a chill through him he wasn’t totally willing to acknowledge.

“We’re done with this conversation. Stay out of my way.”

It was an old command. One he’d used with many operators working under him when he was on a particular mission. He didn’t want their help, he didn’t want their input, he wanted them out of his way so he could do what he did best.

Before that meant hunting down known terrorists.

Today it meant hunting down Anna.