What Floats Beneath

The hotel pool was empty at 2 AM, the water still and black as spilled ink. Elena sat on the edge, legs submerged, watching the ripples distort her reflection. She was good at this waiting game — patience being the primary virtue of her profession. Corporate spy, they called it, though she preferred "competitive intelligence analyst." Words mattered.

Her hair, usually slicked back in an impenetrable corporate knot, had come loose during the four hours she'd spent posing as a drunk conference attendee at the bar downstairs. Now it floated around her shoulders like dark seaweed, untethered.

The door clicked open.

Elena didn't turn. She'd spent three months cultivating Marcus, feeding him carefully curated intel about his rival's pharmaceutical patents. She was supposed to be his asset. Instead, somewhere between the anonymous tips and the midnight meetings in his hotel room, she'd become his lover.

Now her firm wanted his source.

Marcus approached slowly, the water lapping at the pool's edge as he stepped in beside her. His movements were graceful, almost liquid. She watched the droplets bead on his forearms, catching the faint light from underwater.

"They know," she said, not looking at him.

"Who knows?"

"Your source. The leak." She turned then, meeting his eyes. "My employers are getting impatient. They want a name."

He smiled — that predatory, gorgeous smile that had undone her in a Dallas hotel bar four months ago. "You're the spy, Elena. You tell me."

She reached for him, fingers threading through his wet hair. There was something else she wasn't telling him. Something she'd found yesterday afternoon while he was in sessions — a hotel receipt dated six months before they'd met, for a room at the same Dallas hotel, charged to a shell company she'd traced back to his real employer. Not a pharmaceutical competitor. A private intelligence firm. One that contracted with hers.

He wasn't the target. He was another spy.

And she? She was either the asset he was cultivating, or the mark he was about to burn.

Marcus pulled her closer, his hand sliding up her thigh beneath the water's surface. "You're thinking too loud again."

"Marcus," she whispered, and then couldn't finish. Because here was the thing about spies and lies: eventually you couldn't tell which was which. His mouth found hers in the dark, and for the first time in three months, she let herself sink.

They'd sort out who was playing whom tomorrow. Tonight, the water was warm, and she was tired of treading.

"I know," he said against her mouth, and she wasn't sure what he was confessing to, or which one of them he meant. "I know."