Flashback

it was a while before she got back to work, while Justin ordered Chinese takeout. After it arrived, she took her first real look at the printout he’d brought.
“I know that’s just the highlights,” Justin said, gesturing with his chopsticks at the papers spread out on his table. “If you want more details, it’ll take more digging.”
Alex nodded as she plucked a shrimp out of her rice lunch combo. “Marion left her official senatorial papers to the Athena Library. I’ll call Christine to set up access.”
Justin gave her a sideways look over his carton of sweet-and-sour pork. “Can I come?”
She blinked. “To Athena?”
He nodded, a grin curving his mouth. “I think I’d like to see it without having to sneak around.”
She couldn’t help laughing. “You’ve done your share of that, all right. Okay, I’ll take you along. The return of the Dark Angel and all that.”
He rolled his eyes. “Oh, please.”
“Hey, don’t mess with the fantasy.”
He set down his chopsticks. “Is that what I am? A fantasy?”
Alex snorted, rather inelegantly. Her mother would be appalled. “You can ask this of the woman you’ve worn out in the past twelve hours? Fantastic, yes, but fantasy? Hardly. You’re real, Agent Cohen. One hundred percent. Lucky for me.”
He stared at her for a long, silent moment. And the expression that crept over his face made her smile.
“You do have a way with words,” he said. “I’ve never wanted to have raging sex on my kitchen table before.”
Images slammed through her mind, vivid, erotic memories of last night, leading to equally vivid imaginings about what he’d just said. Herself, sprawled naked on the glass table, like some banquet laid out for him to take.
And him taking her.
Hot and fierce, with that driving, hard body that filled her beyond measure, beyond pleasure, beyond joy.
Justin took one look at her face and sucked in a harsh breath. “Alex,” he whispered, in that same gravelly voice she’d heard so often during the night, when he kissed her, when he stroked her, when he shivered beneath her hands on him, when he sank into her. That gravelly voice that sent sensations she’d never felt before, sensations she never guessed she could feel, rippling through her.
Blood surged through her in hot, heavy beats, and in a matter of seconds she thought she might die if they didn’t do exactly what he’d suggested.
So they did.

Chapter 12
“Ah, the Dark Angel returns to Athena.”
To his credit, Justin didn’t groan when Christine greeted them with the teasing comment.
“Through the front door in the daylight this time,” he said. “At least you didn’t say ‘to the scene of the crime,’” he added.
“I thought about it,” the older woman said with a laugh.
“Thank you for holding back, then,” Justin said, grinning at her. Alex smiled to herself; she liked that he was so at ease with the entire concept and with the reality of Athena. Anything less would be a stumbling block she wasn’t sure they could get past.
“I didn’t say it because I don’t really think of it as a crime,” Christine said. “You were just trying to do what had to be done.”
Alex watched his face change, and smiled inwardly at the surprise in his expression.
“Thank you,” he said.
Christine shook her head. “You were part of unraveling a mystery that could have threatened Athena’s very existence. We owe you thanks.”
“And now,” Alex put in when she saw Justin struggling with what to say to that, “we’re trying to solve another Athena mystery.”
“Of course. Marion’s papers.” She got to her feet. “Come along, I’ve brought them into my den. The girls need access to the library, and I was afraid you’d be too much of a distraction.”
“You mean the Dark Angel would be,” Alex teased.
Christine looked back at them. “You both would. And together you make quite a couple. The colors alone are striking.”
She supposed the Athena principal was right. Justin’s dark hair next to her own red-gold locks made an attention-getting combination just because of the contrast. But she still harbored the suspicion that among the female students here, it would be Justin who drew the most interest. And she certainly couldn’t blame them for that.
“Besides,” Christine added to Alex, a wickedly impish expression on her face, “don’t think the Dark Angel legend hasn’t grown. You’re part of it now, too. It’s unbearably romantic, how the girl who saw him all those years ago is now—”
“Oh, Lord,” Alex muttered, waving her to silence with a protesting hand.
Christine laughed, and Alex thought how much happier she sounded now than she had during the chaos last year. Another side benefit of solving that far-reaching conspiracy: Christine had finally been able to put her own small, unwitting part in it behind her.
“I had another thought, as well,” Christine said as they went into the cozy den of her campus bungalow.
The room was lined with bookcases except for one corner that held a roomy computer desk. Centered there was a large flat-screen monitor that seemed oddly angled to Alex until she remembered it was probably adjusted that way for Christine’s lack of vision in her left eye because of a training accident years ago that had ended the former Army captain’s military career.
“What was that?” Alex asked in response to Christine’s comment.
“Marion often accessed her e-mail from here, when she would visit. Because my machine is regularly checked and secure, I don’t think she worried much about confidentiality. You might be able to access those files.” She shrugged. “I could never bring myself to delete them.”
Alex thought of her sister Cassandra Samantha St. John, who so often had said, “Nothing’s ever truly deleted from a computer hard drive.” Sam was a computer whiz who could find things underneath things underneath things on any computer, anywhere.
Hopefully this wouldn’t require that kind of skill, because, although she was fairly good, Alex knew she didn’t have that kind of knack or knowledge. But if they needed it, she knew Sam would come running