SAMPLE THE STORY BY READING CHAPTER ONE

I wiggled into bed, fitting myself snugly into the massive muscular structure of my boss and favorite bed-mate, Mark Condon. We were both stark naked, our usual mode of dress when discussing important business. I had a real thing for him and at that particular moment, it showed itself in the usual ways—wet, wild, warmth to the boiling point. Even though in the back of my nonstop mind I knew that this was exactly the kind of time that Mark always chose to tell me about my next assignment, I determined that I wasn’t going to let that stop me from enjoying his amorous athletics first.

Rubbing against the silk sheets for that little zing it imparted to my freshly Estee Laudered skin, I pressed tighter into him. It didn’t take any more than that to get both of us fully ready.

We both climaxed quickly, my excitement throbbing and ebbing in abrupt little motions. He dismounted, and lay back on a silken pillow.

Turning on my side, I propped myself up on one elbow and asked wickedly, “How was it?”

“Real cherry,” he grinned and ducked as I faked a karate chop to his jugular. I love being teased about my frame but I hate being teased about my name, and he knew it. As Cherry Delight, super-operative of the organization which he himself headed—N.Y.M.P.H.O.—we work closely together. N.Y.M.P.H.O. stands for New York Mafia Prosecution and Harassment Organization. It goes after the nasties in government, but its principal target is the Mafia. Our organization is secret, and our budget comes from a Defense Department allocation that looks like it’s earmarked for something else entirely when the boys in Washington stamp it “Okay.” Some of the organized crowd we have to take on know as much about us as we do about them by now, so I’ve had to master a number of disguises and capabilities for cover. I guess that’s made me a pretty versatile girl.

“How did you like it?” Mark’s voice tickling my ear brought me right back to the present.

“Like I like everything,” I flung back at him, “I loved it!”

“Good!” he said, “I thought it might take some getting used to for you.”

“Why?” I asked, slightly puzzled.

“Because you may be doing a lot of it where you’re going,” he replied, and that really brought me right back to reality. “This time it isn’t Mafia stuff.”

I sat bolt upright, bringing my boobs directly in his line of vision. But for once in his life, he didn’t even notice. He was looking right at my face, checking, I knew, for my reaction to what was coming.

“Greece?” I asked weakly.

“Greece,” he confirmed gently.

“It’s a powder keg,” I reminded him. The government was changing back and forth so frequently there you woke up in the morning not knowing which side you were on—if you were lucky enough to wake up at all. On top of everything else, Cyprus had exploded and now Greece and Turkey were grappling in an on-again, off-again war. The situation was positively murder, I continued the argument. Not that I’m afraid of danger. Hell, it’s my job. But there’s nothing in that nifty little contract that reads like a suicide pact. Not even in the small print.

But since it was the terms of that same contract that made possible all the gorgeous goodies that comprised my rather luxurious life style, I was really in no position to complain about conditions or try to duck an assignment. N.Y.M.P.H.O. kept me in lots more than just silk sheets. My clothes bore the finest labels of couturiers from every fashion capital in the world and they bulged out of the commodious closets of the East Side Manhattan penthouse that let me look down on all of the city during those few moments I had between assignments. I shopped at the best jewelers on three continents, and the accommodation that N.Y.M.P.H.O. provided me while I was on assignments was always the super deluxe available. I liked the way I live enough to risk my neck for it.

And in addition to the training and conditioning that kept my bod primed to perfection, my boss provided me with still another priceless fringe benefit—himself. Mark was everything a girl could hope for—and then some. The fact that he was the one who assigned me to the critical cases I covered seemed to add an extra element to our relationship. Maybe it was that ever-present feeling that always hovered over us, that each time might be the very last, that made it all so super-delicious, that extra tinge of ecstasy that made me always very ready for him. I do know this—in the course of doing my job, I’ve made it with the widest assortment of men imaginable, some killers, some would-be world rulers, some actually among the most powerful men in the world—but I always come running back to Mark as soon as he snaps his fingers. Or blinks his eyes, for that matter. Or anything. Because everything this man does, including inhaling, turns me on like there’s no tomorrow.

Let’s face it: in this racket, plenty of times there isn’t!

I think the fact that he sends me out on assignments where my main weapon is my body makes it a little kinky for him, too. Mark knows this better than anyone else. He also knows that while I give him my everything, it’s not on an exclusive basis by any means. How could it be? My job and his, and the vital work we do, depends on my being able to get guys in the sack who we couldn’t get to any other way. It might just be nookie to some people, but it’s national security to us.

Not that sex is all I’m good for, far from it. That may be my ultimate, but it’s certainly not my only weapon. I can chop my way bare-handed through any torso that happens to get in my way. I’ve dismembered more than one member of the opposition when it became necessary. Sometimes even when it wasn’t necessary. I remember one wrongo I put to the final sleep just to even the score for a couple of young girls he had brutalized and then buried. Eliminating this sick monster from the world wasn’t necessary to my game plan on that occasion, but the blurry vision I had of two 15 year old girls uselessly mangled by this ape’s lust was motivation enough. I didn’t feel as though I had committed murder; I just felt that I had cleaned up some of the pollution in the world.

How many men—and women—I’ve put away in the line of and beyond the call of duty I’ve never counted. Unlike some agents I know, I don’t think there’s any value in the numbers game. You do what you have to and you don’t keep score.

In undercover work, you should be able to swim like a fish, run like a deer, climb like a goat, and screw like a son of a bitch. I guess I qualify on all counts. That’s why I drew top dollar and the baddest cases. Like this one.

“What happens next, boss man?” I asked, running my fingers through his hair and pulling at it just a little.

“You’re booked on Olympic’s flight 412 from JFK Airport this evening,” Mark replied.

“First class, of course,” I teased. It was always first class.

“Of course,” Mark went on, absent-mindedly.

I stopped toying with him. “What’s it about, love?” I asked, dropping my voice. I was suddenly getting a little trembly inside. I wasn’t used to the attitude that was bouncing off him.

He held me so tight it was almost like being clenched within a fist. “Mark, what’s the matter?” I near-panicked.

“I hate giving you this assignment, Cherry,” he blurted out. “If only it wasn’t so goddamn important.” He banged one hand into the other. “It’s me who should be going, and not you!”

So that’s it, I thought to myself. Guilt. My little Mark is getting a little quivery inside himself, or at least the masculine equivalent of it. But why? Nothing we ever did at N.Y.M.P.H.O. was easy—that’s why it was thrown at us. The C.I.A. types had gotten too headline-hungry for the really inside stuff; the ol’ U.S. of A. didn’t maintain any guerrilla goon squads like the little lesser powers did. N.Y.M.P.H.O. already was the closest thing to that. So why should this assignment be any hairier—or scarier—than the usual?

“What gives, love?” I asked playfully, my long tapered fingernails barely raking the tight surface of his chest. “Why the worries?”

I knew as well as the next guy that Greece was jumping, but hell, they never sent me to Fort Lauderdale. Civil war, counter-revolution, undercover invasions, that was all the stuff I grew up on.

Of course, since the Greek-Turkish rumble on Cyprus, it had gotten even thornier, but still nothing to get clutched over. The hardest part of operating in that corner of the world would be keeping the names and the sides straight. Both seemed to change from day to day, with people popping in and out of power quick enough to make your head spin.

“Are the colonels really out now?” I asked Mark.

He turned his forehead to deep furrows. “That’s one of the things we’re not sure about,” he admitted. “Right now, they’re supposedly out of the government, but so far as our best intelligence shows, they’ve just taken a few steps backward in order to lessen their visibility. But we think they’re still pulling the strings, at least the important ones.”

I shrugged. “So what’s the catch?”

“We want the guy who can give us the lowdown on the whole situation,” Mark answered. “He’s about the only one who’s absolutely trustworthy, but—”

“But what?” I asked. Finding a guy and getting him from his place to ours had never been any problem. Even if I had to flush him out of hiding, that wasn’t any great change from the norm.

“In the first place,” Mark recounted slowly, “we are not the only ones who want him.”

“Like who else is interested?” I asked. I love this part of the game, where all the players and all the plays are spelled out for me. It gives me not only the essential background info that I need, but sharpens up the ol’ brain for the swift thinking that becomes a reflex action when I’m actually out in the field and running. I nestled back against my man and concentrated.

“The colonels want him,” Mark explained. “At least they want him to be where they can keep tabs on him and keep him from shooting his mouth off.”

“That shouldn’t be any trouble for those jokers,” I interjected. “Look how many guys they’ve put away permanently, not to mention thousands imprisoned who may never see daylight again.”

“Ah, but they can’t do that with our boy,” Mark explained. “He’s too important.”

“Who is he, any way?” I remembered to ask. Mark had been tossing around a lot of info but a name hadn’t dropped yet.

“Demetrios Starka,” he said, and all the haze in front of my eyes cleared immediately.

“Aha!” I said, “why didn’t you tell me that at the beginning?”

“It would have made it too easy,” Mark grinned. “But now you understand why the big boys can’t touch him. He means too much to the people, both personally and as a symbol, for the military minds to lay hands on him. They don’t want him active, because he hates their guts and everything they stand for, but if anything happened to him, it could start wholesale bloodshed in the country on a scale that would make the last twenty-five years of war look like Captain Kangaroo on a nice Tuesday morning.”

So that was my target, the famous Demetrios Starka. He was an internationally acclaimed artist who turned away from his paints and his breathtaking canvasses to devote himself to gaining at least a toehold of democracy for his country. The people loved him for it, and he had become a hero and symbol of resistance to tyranny. For years, he had had to live underground and in furtive flight from the dictators.

With the last change in government, he had resurfaced briefly, I remembered, but then dropped out of sight again.

“Is he in hiding again?” I asked Mark.

“Not exactly,” was his answer. “We know where he is, but visitors are not exactly encouraged. It’s really very knotty, babe.”

“Like what isn’t?” I reminded him.

“The thing is,” Mark went on, “that while they’re protecting Demetrios for their own purposes, to deactivate him more or less, they’re also trying to keep him from being bumped off, by anyone else, which would give them the same brand of trouble as if they’d done him in themselves.”

“Why would any third party want to get rid of him?” I asked.

“To turn the country into turmoil, and so able to move in,” he answered.

“And whose idea is that?” I wanted to know.

Mark spread his hands out. “Maybe the Turks,” he suggested. “If they got their greedy hands on Demetrios, they might use him any number of ways—claim he defected, for one. That would demoralize the country sufficiently to topple the new regime. Or they could give him the publicity he doesn’t have now, and that could have the same effect.”

“But we could give him that,” I injected excitedly. “He could certainly come here and air his views freely.” I loved the image I got, of returning triumphantly with the handsome Greek in tow, sub rosa of course.

And handsome he was too, with a wild head of curly dark hair and eyes that burned right through you. He was constructed on the lines of the classic Greek sculptures, those gods and heroes who had thrilled generations with their masculine strength and grace. I had seen him only once, years ago when a group of his paintings were put on display in New York to raise funds for the freedom fighters, but I had never forgotten the fervor that seemed to burn through his whole being.

It was going to be exciting to find him, and in more ways than one. I was almost licking my lips in anticipation of the whole caper.

“There’s only one problem,” Mark’s voice interrupted my momentary daydream.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“He doesn’t like us,” Mark smiled. “He puts us in the same class as the dictators and oppressors of mankind he’s always carrying on against.”

“Then why do we want him?” I couldn’t help asking.

“Because he’s absolutely incorruptible and honest,” Mark answered. “He’s dedicated to truth as well as to his concept of freedom, and like us or not, he won’t lie to us. He can tell us for sure if this new group is on the up-and-up or not, whether he has any freedom of movement, or it’s just a sham, with them holding him on a well-concealed leash.”

As he explained the problems of the mission, I could sense the underlying tensions which an outsider would never have been able to even guess at in Mark. He kept his emotions and feelings under the tightest, least apparent control of any human being I’ve ever seen. He could as well have been talking about a backgammon game as about a globe-shattering powder keg that could explode in all our faces at any moment.

“This is a biggie, huh?” I asked, stroking his forehead and trying to sound light.

“Yeah,” he answered, “a real biggie.” He took my hand and kissed the inside of the wrist gently. Then he lifted his head and said quietly, “And I haven’t even given you the kicker yet.”

I groaned. Wasn’t the whole situation crazy enough already without any last-minute additions? I already had two warring countries to contend with; that should have been more than enough, even without counting in the complicated politics that were raging in each. Or the uneasy truce that could break out into open warfare at any time.

“There’s a Turkish underground in Greece, without any official link to the government, at least not any that we’ve been able to establish,” Mark went on. “They may not have any interest in Demetrios, so they may not get in your way. Whatever happens, don’t you get in theirs.”

“Why?” I asked. Foolish girl.

“Opium,” Mark replied simply. “The prime movers, and they’re looking for a new way to move it. France may be getting too hot or too costly.”

“Sounds like tricky business,” I said, “running an illicit operation in an unfriendly country.”

“They’re tricky people,” Mark replied, “totally ruthless, with real big bucks at stake. And now that their government has broken the poppy-growing agreement we had with them, the stuff is coming through in terrific quantities. They have to move—and move fast.”

“And with the political situation the way it is over there, who’d think of looking for Turks in Greece,” I added. “The whole thing sort of makes sense when you stop to think about it.”

“That’s exactly what you’re going to have to be doing, thinking,” Mark reminded me. “That’s why I hate like hell to assign you to this mission, Cherry.”

“Because I’ll have to think?” I teased him.

“No, because there are too damn many pitfalls involved,” he answered. “But you’re the only one who has a remote chance of getting around Demetrios, and the whole thing is too damned important not to give it everything we’ve got.”

“Which is me,” I boasted.

“Which is you,” Mark agreed. “By the way, do you speak Greek?”

“Just a little,” I said.

“Just tell me the word for good-bye, and then you’d better get going.”

I put my face to his and forced his mouth open by the pressure of my own on it. Then using some more of the same pressure, I forced his lips closed tightly over my tongue, twisting and thrusting inside the delicious wet. I drew in long and deep, barely remembering to breath. It would be such a long time between swallows I wanted to take in as much as I could while I could.

Finally I needed air. I pulled my mouth from his and smiled slightly. “There,” I breathed, “that’s good-bye in any language.”

Mark returned the salute. “It’s Greek to me,” he said.

Reluctantly, I pulled his hands off my breasts. It was time to go.

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