The Reveal

by Julie Leto

  Luckily, she always had a fallback plan. Like falling hard for the man she was supposed to protect. Or, more immediately, having a random guy who stank of booze exclaim that he’d seen her before.

  A switch in accent usually threw people off, but this guy’s crooked-tooth grin peaked through his overgrown facial hair with an air of stubborn familiarity.

  “Aye, you, I’ve seen before. I rarely forget a redhead, lass. It’s against my upbringing.”

  The faint Irish accent he’d used to greet her transformed into full-on brogue. She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. The lady tourists who swarmed this quaint, coastal town probably tipped bigger when they heard him shift into his best Colin Farrell.

  Brynn just wanted to blend in long enough to collect her food. “Oh, have you been to Berlin?”

  Despite her outstretched hand, he held tightly to the sack, concentrating all his energy into coming up with an answer.

  Thinking, for this guy, looked painful.

  “Haven’t left this beach paradise for over ten years. Came here for a vacation with my wife and never left. She took off so long ago I hardly remember her. But you, you I’ve seen before.”

  Brynn turned down the wattage of her grin and glanced around her. The lobby of the hotel was empty except for a young desk clerk who was engrossed in the screen of his smartphone.

  Brynn tucked away her ring-less left hand. “This is my first time in Spanien. Honeymoon.”

  The delivery guy’s saucy grin retreated beneath his mass of beard. His gaze darted for any sign of a husband who might not appreciate him flirting with his new bride.

  Brynn used his momentary distraction to snatch away the food.

  His eyes, muddy blue and rimmed by tired lids, shot back to her. He examined her face with entirely too much interest, spawning a prickly field of gooseflesh at the nape of her neck.

  Was he really just an overly friendly delivery guy? Or had he been sent to do reconnaissance for whomever had chased Brynn and Sean out of the safe house?

  “How much do I owe?” she asked.

  Time to end this tête-à-tête. The less time he had to place her, the better.

  He rattled off the amount. His expression changed from suspicious to pleased once she handed him a stack of euros and he calculated how much cash she’d turned over with a sultry, “Stimmt so.”

  Clearly, he was familiar with the German phrase for “keep the change.” He counted through the euros a second time, bumping his shoulder on the doorjamb on his way out. She gave him one last grin when he looked back but then focused on the sack of food until he disappeared.

  Once he was gone, she rushed upstairs, containing her speed only to avoid grabbing the attention of the disinterested clerk or any guests who might be wandering the halls. Once on their floor, she sprinted, threw open the door, shoved herself through and locked it behind her. Without hesitation, she burst into the tiny bathroom where Sean was wrapping a towel around his waist.

  She spoke through a suddenly dry mouth. “We’ve got to go.”

  She dumped the food on the table by the door and tore open the drawer she’d used to tuck away their dirty traveling clothes. She could have cared less about the jeans and T-shirts, but they’d need the jackets. Sunny Spain wasn’t so warm in winter, and France would be even colder.

  “What happened?” he asked calmly.

  She stuffed their clothes into a laundry bag. They’d dump them at the first opportunity. They needed to leave no trace.

  “Get dressed.” She pulled a clean shirt and jeans from the go-bag beside the door and tossed them to him.

  He dropped his towel and obeyed, but not without scowling. “Tell me what happened.”

  “I think I might have been ‘made’ by the delivery guy.”

  Sean winced as he jabbed his damp legs into his jeans, but by the time he wrapped his strong hands around her upper arms to force her to hold still, his command of his body had returned.

  Guilt jabbed through her panic. He wasn’t one hundred percent healed. She’d just put him through some very rough-and-tumble sex, and now she was ordering him to speed up because of a hunch that some random guy might have identified her?

  Luckily, Sean wasn’t so easily spooked.

  “Slow down,” he ordered. “Tell me what happened.”

  Unlike the shaking she’d experienced since their lovemaking, this persistent quake settled the moment Sean touched her. He had a quelling effect on her. Yes, he made her nervous. Yes, he made her hot. But no man to date, not even her father, had ever made her feel so safe.

  “The man from the restaurant. He said he knew me.”

  Sean’s eyes darkened. “Did you recognize him?”

  Brynn concentrated, mentally stripping away the man’s beard and focusing on the shape of his nose, the color of his eyes and the distinctive sound of his voice. For nearly her entire adult life, she’d worked the European division of Titan International. She’d heard more lilts, brogues and accents than a coffee vendor at Heathrow. But she had a very good memory for faces, and nothing about that guy was the least bit familiar.

  “I don’t think so. But he could have been a plant. Someone could have sent him into the hotel.”

  “Or he’s just a guy who thought you looked familiar.”

  She cursed. “I should have dyed my hair. Hell, I should have cut it. Instead, I got laid. Some secret agent I’m turning out to be.”

  “We discussed this,” Sean said, his voice steady. “We had only a brief window to change your look, and we opted to get el Creador working on a new passport rather than take the time to put together a disguise. We made a choice.”

  “Maybe it was the wrong choice,” Brynn said.

  Sean eyed the door, his hands sliding from her arms to her wrists. “It does seem like a weird coincidence that some guy would claim to know you when we’re on the run.”

  “I don’t believe in coincidences, do you?”

  He shook his head. “Two months ago, someone took me off an American street and sent me to England to be tortured for information that I don’t have. Then someone else, we don’t know who, arranged for you to come to my rescue. Now, in a town where you have a high-value contact who can get us the papers we need to slip into France and figure out what’s really going on, you get recognized on your first trip out of the room? No, I don’t believe in coincidences.”

  Brynn continued packing, but she no longer felt like her internal organs needed to pop out of her skin in order to operate. “We need to get out of San Sebastían now. We can use another contact for papers or try to cross the border illegally.”

  “Or we can sniff around first and see if maybe we’re jumping the gun.”

  His voice was even, but his gaze darted to the door. “No one has had time to track us down. We’ve been here less than a day.”

  “We could have been followed,” she insisted.

  “We weren’t,” he argued. “I’m not an amateur, Brynn, and neither are you. On the deserted roads we took, we would have seen evidence of a tail.”

  “They could use cyber tactics.”

  Sean continued to dress, putting on shoes, toweling his hair dry and slicking it back before he checked his ammunition and gun and then shrugged into his jacket.

  “Your laptop has advanced security protocols, and our phones are untraceable. We stole a car at random and ditched it on the outskirts of town. We took public transportation to get to your friend, the forger, so unless he gave us up, no one has had time to find us. You can’t deny the possibility that you’re being paranoid.”

  “Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get me,” she countered, quoting a covert operations adage that might have shifted from wisdom to cliché but that wasn’t any less true. “What if they tracked us via satellite imaging?”

  The corner of his mouth quirked into a grin. “You’ve been watching too many spy movies.”

  “My father’s life was a spy movie. And I’ve been w
orking on the fringe of your industry for years. I’m not naïve. I know what capabilities are out there.”

  “Then you also know that most of those capabilities are available only if someone pays a shitload of money or works through reams of red tape to get satellite time that can’t be tracked by any other world agency that might be watching skyward. We’re not worth that kind of trouble.”

  “Maybe Jayda is.”

  “Jayda is dead.”

  Every time Sean repeated that claim, an arctic chill sliced up Brynn’s spine. She knew that he believed his former lover was no longer alive, but had he convinced himself because he trusted the veracity of the information, or could he not accept that the woman he’d risked everything for was somehow still alive, responsible for his pain?

  Brynn could think of a million reasons why a high-level assassin might abandon a man who loved her, but the idea of Brynn ever doing that to Sean caused an ache in her stomach that nearly doubled her over. They’d been lovers for less than a week, and already, Brynn had risked her life and her career to help him find the answers he needed.

  Did that make Jayda the fool, or Brynn?

  Pushing her own conflicted feelings aside, Brynn focused on one inalienable fact—Jayda was the reason Sean had been tortured. Jayda was the reason why Sean, a giving, caring lover, would leave Brynn in a heartbeat if he thought it would further his cause.

  Dead or alive, this phantom from Sean’s past was haunting him—haunting them. Could Brynn exorcise Jayda’s memory from Sean’s brain and win them a shot at a real relationship? Did she want to?

  “I think we should leave,” Brynn suggested. “As a precaution.”

  “Not until we get what we came for.”

  “There’s another forger down the coast,” she assured him. “He’s not quite as reliable, but maybe that will work in our favor.”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Sean said. “Not yet. It’s one thing to be watched at a safe house where we’ve stayed put for six weeks, but it’s something else to be tracked across the Spanish countryside in less than twenty-four hours. You’re spooked. I get it. And maybe your gut is dead-on. Still, I should take a look around before we go flying into the night. Agreed?”

  No, Brynn didn’t agree. But if she’d learned one thing about Sean, it was that no matter how conciliatory he pretended to be, her approval wasn’t needed.

  She wasn’t even sure if he needed her anymore…and that scared her worst of all.

  Three

  “Take this,” she said, offering him her weapon.

  Apparently, when calm, cool, collected Brynn Blake got spooked, she lost her head a little. As former covert ops, he should have considered her nerves as a dangerous threat to the mission. But he hadn’t been an agent for years. Distance and time gave him the perspective to see her fear for what it really was.

  She cared.

  About him—more than she cared about herself.

  This was not good.

  “I’ve got my own piece,” he reminded her, though as she’d been the one who’d unlocked the gun safe at the house in Barcelona and had invited him to pick his poison, he wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t already know.

  She shook her head, snatching the proffered handgun to her chest. “I’m out of my element here, Sean. Why did Dante think I could do this? Protect you on my own.”

  “It wasn’t Dante,” Sean reminded her.

  “Fine! Why did anyone think I could do this?”

  Sean tamped down a grin, knowing she wouldn’t appreciate his seeing humor in her moment of frustration. Brynn was accomplished at covert ops, and up until this moment, she’d reacted as any seasoned agent would.

  But she wasn’t a seasoned agent, adequately and honestly prepped on the full scope and risks of the operation. She was a woman who’d been misled, lied to and swept up in a sexual relationship that she’d initiated not because of mutual attraction, trust or respect but as a means to an end.

  She’d pushed herself, professionally and personally, to the limits. It did not surprise him that cracks were starting to form—cracks he might not be able to seal with standard reassurances. Sean was keenly aware of how far out of her comfort zone Brynn had come.

  He wasn’t far behind.

  Sean took her firearm, but instead of concealing it, he closed the distance between them. He grabbed her hand. She gasped but did not pull away.

  With slow sensuality, he widened her clenched fingers, one by one, easing the hard steel against her palm. He pressed the gun firmly against her skin, giving her no choice but to adjust her grip until she’d regained the power the weapon promised.

  He watched her eyes. With a sharp sizzle, the fear ignited by the deliveryman’s claim fizzled as if Sean had licked his fingers and pressed the wet pads on a wick.

  “Got it?”

  She nodded.

  Her chin was set. Her lips curved into a self-deprecating grin.

  “Stay put,” he ordered.

  He dimmed the lights, took a long glance out of the third-story window then kissed her softly on the cheek and disappeared out the door.

  * * *

  In less than ten minutes, he’d returned.

  In less than ten minutes, Brynn realized that at some point over the past six weeks, she’d fallen into a deep, dark pit of emotion, as unfamiliar and terrifying as any hole in the ground. Sean mattered to her. The thought of him getting hurt again tore at her core, not because she’d been ordered to protect him but because he’d become a part of her life.

  This could not be good.

  “I didn’t see anything suspicious,” he said, locking the door behind him and grabbing the food she’d abandoned earlier. Gingerly, he extracted a pint of colorful gazpacho that had spilled some of its garlicky deliciousness into the paper tote.

  Fresh off his solo adventure, he looked invigorated and re-energized, wholly unaware of what was going on in the madness of her heart.

  “You checked the—”

  He quelled her questions with a level glare. “Cher, I’ve been doing recon since you were in finishing school. If anyone is watching this place now, I’d have noticed.”

  She pushed herself out of the freshly dug emotional well. Now wasn’t the time to acknowledge her feelings, much less deal with them. Not when they might be on the brink of a crisis.

  “They don’t need to watch us anymore,” she said. “If that man worked for the people chasing us, then they already know we’re here.”

  “And if he was just an overly friendly delivery guy angling for a bigger tip, you’ve worried for nothing. Our best bet is to stick to our original plan. We’ll take turns by the window and sleep in shifts. But for right now, we’ll eat. I’m starved.”

  Sean removed a lamp from on top of a small antique table and then scooted it closer to the bed so one of them could sit on the mattress. He was right. She could be overreacting—on both personal and professional levels. She resolved to take the first shift by the window, but Sean redirected her onto the bed then shoved a container of soup and a spoon into her hands.

  “Eat,” he said. “Then you can grab a shower and maybe a couple more hours of sleep. I’m too pumped.”

  As he unwrapped and dished out their dinner as if she hadn’t just acted like a newbie agent on her first mission, he filled the silence with a story about a stakeout he’d been on in Bangladesh where he’d had nothing but unfamiliar foods to keep him from starving. Though she attempted to laugh in all the right places, she could not have repeated a single word of what he’d said.

  She’d freaked out. She’d overreacted to what she could now see was probably a case of overzealous flirting, not highly skilled subterfuge. She’d put Sean at risk simply because she’d been focused on the threat of failure rather than on taking the necessary steps toward success.

  “Stop it,” Sean said.

  Brynn popped instantly out of the deprivation chamber she’d erected out of her own self-loathing.

  She snat
ched the carton of cold Spanish soup from across the table. “Stop what?”

  “Beating yourself up,” he replied.

  “Now you read minds?”

  “Don’t have to. I know the look. I’ve seen it often enough in a mirror. So you might have jumped the gun earlier, but you might not have. Your instincts told you something was wrong, and extra precautions are not a bad thing, particularly when it would be so easy for us to fall back into this bed and forget about anything and everything that brought us here in the first place.”

  Brynn scooped through the soup, only vaguely aware of the bright mix of colors and textures. “Too easy.”

  “If you still want to leave—”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head while she stirred the soup, the spicy aroma settling her nerves and reinvigorating her hunger. “We’ve got a good setup here. We’ll be gone by morning. It’s just been a while since I’ve taken to the field without a backup team of highly trained agents who rely on me for their paycheck.”

  Sean’s grin, which lit straight to his blue-gray eyes, caused a flutter in her stomach.

  “You can write me a check if it’ll make you feel better,” he said. “But I require several forms of ID. You know how people are these day about false papers.”

  Brynn laughed, resisted the childish urge to fling food at him for his cheekiness and instead smiled her way through dinner. They both needed a serious infusion of calories, so in addition to the cold vegetable soup, they feasted on a carton of buttery shrimp and octopus, a mound of saffron-infused rice and a delectable roasted pork that they ate with their fingers.

  And though they both made weak claims about being stuffed, they battled with spoons for four bites each of flan.

  By the time she’d rolled into the bathroom for a shower, Brynn’s lungs ached from laughing. With Sean’s help, she’d shaken off her nerves and had spent an hour eating and joking, barely aware of the six times Sean had gotten up to look out the window or the two times he’d stuck his head into the hallway to investigate suspicious sounds.

  She’d been undercover before—in this town and countless others across the continent—and she’d never had so much fun. She’d always been in charge, the key contact in operations that somehow were always make-or-break for her reputation, her company and her career. This mission wasn’t any different. In fact, rescuing Sean and spiriting him away to the house she’d inherited and had kept secret from the world had been the most dangerous she’d ever accepted.