Express Male by Elizabeth Bevarly

overly long hair curled carelessly over his ears, and his full mouth was curved into just a hint of a smile. He looked playful and charming and sweet. Something twisted painfully in her chest as she looked at him. Hell, he was playful and charming and sweet.
    He couldn’t possibly be selling government secrets to terrorists.
    But when she turned another page, she was hit by a wall of incriminating evidence. ChemiTech held a lot of government contracts, many of them pretty hush-hush. Now, leaks of top-secret information were streaming from the department where Daniel worked, and they’d begun almost immediately after his employment at the company began. The information that had been sold overseas had all come either from projects Daniel was working on, or ones to which he could easily gain access. There had been two suspicious deposits made to his bank account in the past nine months, one for twenty thousand dollars, and one for fifteen thousand dollars. The money had then been immediately withdrawn, and there was no trace of where it went.
    Of course, there were others, too, in that department, working on those projects, who had access to the additional files—though no one else’s financial records reflected sudden substantial income. OPUS had narrowed their search to five potential suspects. Daniel was third on that list. The primary suspect was the very man who had brought Daniel to work at ChemiTech, his mentor and former professor, Dr. Sebastian Baird, who had begun working for the company less than a year before Daniel.
    Ellie’s stomach roiled with nausea as she read the rest of the file. OPUS had collected a lot of background information on each of the suspects, and there were a number of discrepancies in what OPUS had uncovered about Daniel and what he’d told her about himself. He’d said he grew up in Santa Barbara, California, when in fact he hadn’t moved there until he went to college. He’d actually been born and raised in Apache Junction, Arizona. He’d told Ellie he was a starter for his high-school basketball team and had been elected homecoming king for the girls’ basketball team, mostly because he’d dated the girls’ team in its entirety. He’d also told her he’d lettered in track in college. But according to OPUS’s findings, he’d only been a standout in the Chemistry and Latin clubs in high school, and had been ostracized by the more popular students. In college, his biggest claim to fame was patenting a new synthetic fiber.
    In fact, according to OPUS’s files, Daniel Beck carried all the characteristics of the very sort of person who would commit the very type of crime of which he was suspected. He’d been an involuntary outsider at school, smarter than just about everyone else and had had few friends, none of them close. Likewise damning was the fact that he’d been in counseling for a while as a teenager, to treat his unmanageable anger.
    The picture OPUS painted of him was in no way similar to the guy Ellie had come to know and…like very much. Daniel Beck was probably the least angry person of her acquaintance. He had lots of friends, and even more girlfriends. There was no freaking way she could see him being the kind of person who would sell out his country, sell out himself.
    But then, she didn’t think there was any freaking way he could be a liar, either.
    She sighed heavily as she turned another page in the dossier. No wonder Noah had told her she’d have questions after she went over everything. The problem now was that she didn’t think Noah would be able to answer them. No, only Daniel Beck could do that. And Ellie couldn’t think of a single way to ask them that wouldn’t make him suspicious of her right from the start.
    At least her cover would be convincing. Naturally Ellie hadn’t told Daniel about her training to become an OPUS agent, since no one was allowed to know where she worked or what she did for a living. To explain her unavailability on Mondays,