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His Hot Number
By Shannon Hollis Harlequin Enterprises, Ltd.
Copyright © 2004 Harlequin Enterprises, Ltd.
All right reserved. ISBN: 0-373-79148-8
Chapter One
JUST HER LUCK - she was a phone-sex virgin.
State investigator Linn Nichols sat alone in a modified glass-walled interrogation room that contained the secure phone line nicknamed the "hot number." The undercover investigators always had their targets call that line, whose number was changed for every new operation. It was always answered by someone who had been briefed on what to say, and the conversations were always recorded.
Half a dozen men stood at the windows watching her, probably already planning how they were going to tell the guys on swing shift about this when they got in. It wasn't every day that a female investigator transferred into the narcotics division of the California Law Enforcement Unit, much less one who had agreed to give them this kind of entertainment on a Wednesday morning.
She might have earned her stripes with the covert ops unit of the Santa Rita PD, but she was an unknown entity to these guys. Too bad she couldn't have proved herself in some other way.
She couldn't think about her audience. Right now it was just Linn and Rick O'Reilly, the West Coast's slipperiest cocaine importer, on the phone, all alone.
All she had to do was make him believe.
No problem. "Fake it till you make it." That was the mantra innarcotics. If she wasn't exactly sure how to fake a seduction over the phone, she'd figure it out in the next ten minutes, or die of embarrassment trying.
The tallest of the men who were ranged along the glass nudged the guy beside him without taking his eyes off her. She was only a rookie with a grand total of one State of California paycheck to her credit, which was probably why she hadn't seen him before. Unlike the others, he didn't wear an identification badge on a clip. He couldn't be a civilian, though - he had too good a rapport with the other investigators. And he definitely wasn't a lawyer. With the confident stance of someone who had taken on the worst the streets had to offer - and beaten it - he shook back the hair that brushed his shoulders.
And what shoulders they were, too. The black Aerosmith concert T-shirt stretched tight across his chest and wrapped around upper arms hard with muscle. The T-shirt was tucked into a pair of worn jeans that hugged him and invited a woman to stroke him where the fabric was faded and soft at his hip, thigh and fly.
With a start she realized she was staring at his crotch, and worse, he'd caught her at it. One corner of his mouth lifted in a half grin.
That did it. Linn focused on the scratched wood tabletop and tried to channel her energy into making up a character. It wasn't that she could feel him watching her, or that she couldn't drag in enough oxygen to stop the erratic pounding of her heart, or that, despite her jacket and jeans, she was freezing.
She had to do this right. The team was counting on her to get them the information they needed, and she couldn't let some buff biker type and his nudging and smiling distract her.
When the phone rang, Nudge-and-Smile shifted his weight to the other foot. She took a deep breath and put her head down on her arm along the tabletop. She'd heard once that the differing tensions on the throat changed the sound of the voice when the body was horizontal. She hoped it was true. She needed to sound tousled and sleepy - a woman ripe for pillow talk.
Allowing her lips to soften into a pout, Linn relaxed her shoulders and picked up the receiver.
"Hello?" Her voice was a seductive whisper, as if she'd been awakened by the phone. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the operator give the thumbs-up, and the men leaned in to listen to the recording equipment outside the room. Nudge-and-smile crossed his arms and narrowed his gaze.
There was a pause while the suspect on the other end of the line adjusted. He hadn't been expecting her. The call had been set up between him and an operative known on the streets as "Dean," a guy whose identity was so secret Linn didn't yet know which of the investigators he was.
"Well, hi. Who's this?"
"Caroline." Linn injected the rounded vowels of Kensington W8 into her voice, gleaned from an exchange term spent at Oxford studying the history of justice administration. "And who is this?"
"Rick. Dean didn't tell me about any Carolines. Now I know why."
"Oh?" she purred, as if she already knew the answer, as if men were in the habit of keeping her their dirty little secret.
"Because he knows what a sucker I am for a pretty voice."
"Don't you mean face?" You scumball charmer, you.
"Voice for now. Face, maybe later. Like when Dean lets you out in public so I can buy you a drink."
"There is no let. If I want to have a drink with you, darling, I will."
"You shouldn't talk to strangers that way."
"You're no stranger ... Richard."
Suspicion leaked into his voice. "How come I haven't met you?"
She was going to have to tread carefully here, while doing her best to sound ingenuous. "I only arrived this week."
"Dean never said anything."
"Does he share his love life with you? Oooh, I'm either going to have to be very, very careful or very, very bad. Which would you prefer?"
She'd taken him aback a second time, judging by his pause. Hard to believe when you considered the element he hung around with.
She glanced up and locked gazes with nudge-and-smile. Why was he staring at her as if she were a lock and he had a handful of picks?
"I like a bad girl who's very, very careful."
Rick's voice sounded in her ear - and on the tape - and she dragged her attention back to him.
"I'm always careful. So much so that you probably don't know we have a mutual friend."
"Yeah?"
"Hidalgo Martinez sends his regards from Acapulco. He has a new house there. I visited last winter."
"No kidding." He stopped. "Was that before or after he got busted?"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from His Hot Number by Shannon Hollis Copyright © 2004 by Harlequin Enterprises, Ltd.. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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