by Julie Leto
“You mean you were called in?”
“Yeah,” he admitted, combing his fingers through his long hair, tugging hard on the strands.
Brynn smiled. Under any other circumstance, she doubted he’d display such an obvious tic, but this topic had him on edge.
“And you found her?”
He nodded. “Eventually. Before it was too late, at any rate.”
When his eyes met hers, a hard edge sharpened his expression into one she hadn’t seen before. Fear skittered up her spine, reminding her of all he’d endured—and hinting at what he’d dished out when he’d been on the other side. Sean Devlin might have become her gentle, giving lover in the microcosm of this villa, but in the outside world, he was a dangerous man.
“Okay, wait,” she said, backtracking. “You were sent to find her. Why’d she go off-grid?”
“She was intercepted by a terrorist sleeper cell,” he answered, his voice absent of emotion of any kind. “They’d lured her there, thinking she’d be easy to break and turn to their cause. They wanted her to take out an important American asset, but we never found out who the target was. They hadn’t gotten that far when I found her. I freed her, but then she didn’t want to go back to T-45. She wanted to defect.”
Brynn wasn’t intimately familiar with the CIA playbook, but she was pretty certain that taking on a rogue agent after she’d been exposed to potential brainwashing could not have been a popular prospect.
“Your superiors wanted her?”
Judging by the set of his jaw, the answer was clear.
“I talked them into it. Or technically, Dante did. She trusted me, so I was assigned as her handler. Unfortunately, I took that title a bit too literally.”
Brynn scrunched the blanket around her. Jealousy iced through her veins, and she hated it. But her unreasonable emotions had no place here.
Sean was not hers to protect or possess. He was only hers until he finally made good on his promise to escape.
“So the people who took you are looking for Jayda. They thought you could lead them to her. Can you?”
His gaze froze on hers. “She’s dead.”
“You’re sure?”
He looked away, again dragging his fingers through the hair he’d refused to let her trim. “Until a month ago, I was. Now? I don’t know. That’s why I need to get out of here, and I need you to help me. If Jayda is still alive, she’s in danger. I need to find her before the thugs who grabbed me do. Before the Arm or T-45.”
“What if those thugs are the Arm or T-45?” she posited.
He reached across the mattress and took her hands in his. When he tugged her back into his space, it wasn’t to kiss her or hold her or remind her of the intimacies they’d shared. He needed her help. To save another woman. A woman he’d probably loved.
“That’s why I can’t go this alone. I want to, but I’m not at one hundred percent, and by the time I’m totally recovered, it could be too late. Will you help me? Will you defy Dante and maybe even put your life at risk? For me?”
Ten
For one long, tortured moment, Sean thought Brynn would either beg him to reconsider his escape plan or flat out refuse to help. She did neither. She jumped out of bed, threw on a robe and disappeared downstairs without uttering a single word.
He didn’t have the strength to follow her.
Physically, he was depleted. And emotionally?
Damn.
For as long as Sean could remember, he’d never factored his feelings into the decisions he made. He wasn’t heartless. He acknowledged that he had emotions. He regularly tapped into them for the juice to drive him toward getting what he wanted. His ambition, determination and focus were born from his need to love, protect and, sometimes, avenge.
But he never indulged in his feelings. Pity parties were for suckers. He was a soldier. He pushed forward and moved on before crap like anger, hate, fear had a chance to fuck with his mind or throw him off course.
That’s how he’d gotten through finding out what a bastard his father was. That’s how he’d dealt with his mother’s perpetual optimism and how he’d survived loving Jayda, even after she’d disappeared. Hell, especially after she’d disappeared. His ability to disconnect his brain from his heart had gotten him through tough times.
Now, as his broken bones, torn ligaments and rendered flesh knitted back together, so had the conduit that connected his brain to his heart. He cared whether or not Brynn trusted him—and he had no idea why.
Maybe it was because she’d saved him. Maybe it was because she worried about how he’d react to her involvement, whatever it was, in his half brother’s death. She was smart, beautiful, sexy. And if Dante trusted her, she was trustworthy. But would she swing to Sean’s side while his old spymaster friend held something powerful over her head?
The overload of questions and sex eventually knocked him out. When he woke up, the sun was setting, and Brynn was sitting at his bedside, a small, electronic disc cradled in her palm.
“I found it in a fake bottom in the takeout containers,” she explained.
The room overflowed with shadows. He took the bug from her while she flicked on the bedside lamp.
“Good thing you like to eat on china,” he said.
She snorted. “My snobbery saved us from having our conversations monitored. Bully for me.”
He turned the gadget, about the size and shape of a lithium cell battery, over in his hand. He recognized the model. It was American-made—and expertly deactivated. She hadn’t smashed a single component.
“You’re sure the rest of the house isn’t wired?”
She nodded. “I inherited this property from one of the most private women on the planet. And after we arrived, Marisela did a very thorough sweep. The place is clean.”
“They could be listening from outside,” he offered.
Brynn reached across to the bed stand, flipped open a hidden panel that revealed a control panel for a built-in stereo system. A couple of clicks later and music streamed through speakers tucked into corners and behind light fixtures. If anyone was listening now, they’d have a hard time distinguishing between their conversations and the lyrics from the songs.
“I spotted a fishing boat anchored about fifty yards from the beach.”
“So?”
“Fishing boats aren’t allowed that close to the shore, but it gives them a perfect angle to the house if they have high-powered binoculars.”
He swung his legs over the side of the bed. “And you know this how?”
“Because my high-powered binoculars picked out the sailors on the boat in about ten seconds flat. The equipment they’re using won’t get them far in netting spotted sea bass.”
“I told you Dante was having us watched,” he said, reaching for his pants.
Brynn scooped up the denim. “We don’t know that it’s Dante.”
“You don’t know that it isn’t,” he said. “I take it you tried to contact him.”
She grabbed his shirt from where he’d tossed it half under the bed and helped him stuff his stiff muscles into the sleeves. The more he moved, the more he loosened up—but he could tell by the haste with which Brynn dressed him that something had changed since he’d asked her to switch allegiance—something that had shifted not only her way of thinking, but the way she moved.
She’d gone from languorous and sensual to compact and precise. She wasn’t trying to slow him down anymore. On the contrary, she was speeding things up.
“What happened?” he asked, grabbing her wrist before she could pull away.
Her hypnotic, green eyes flashed with so many emotions at once, he couldn’t catalogue them all. But the anger simmering in the set of her jaw—thankfully, not centered on him—told him she’d done more than just find unexpected audio surveillance equipment in the bottom of their paella delivery and catch sight of sloppy agents bobbing in the sea below.
“I broke protocol,” she confessed. “I made some more, um, forceful inqu
iries about what Dante wanted me to do with you now that you’re nearly recovered. But apparently, Dante is on a mission, possibly in the Middle East. Maybe North Africa. My contact could only tell me that he’s been off the grid for at least two months.”
Sean shoved his legs into his jeans, wincing when his muscles protested. “Maybe that’s why he called you to execute my rescue? Because he was going to be out of touch.”
Brynn shook her head. “When I got the call from Dante, I did a back-trace. Call it paranoid, but I like to double-check before I go running off halfway across the world on a rescue mission under orders from a man I haven’t heard from in years. The call came from France, from the Languedoc-Roussillon region. I couldn’t pin it down more than that without breaking some serious encryptions.”
“Dante has a home in Languedoc-Roussillon. It’s where he and Macy got married last year.”
“I know,” Brynn replied. “It’s one of the few things I was able to learn about his personal life before I rescued you. Not that he lived there, specifically, but that he’d traveled to the area several times in the past year. Seemed legit for the call to come from there.”
“Makes sense.”
She opened her mouth but stopped before continuing. He could practically watch the gears in her head shift, rewind, then grind forward again. “Wait, Dante’s married? What kind of woman marries a guy like him?”
“One who is just as dangerous as he is,” Sean replied, but with a smile. He liked Macy, but the feelings weren’t exactly mutual. She didn’t hate him enough to have him kidnapped and tortured, but she wouldn’t have cried at his funeral if he hadn’t survived.
“Anyway,” Brynn continued, “if Dante was in the Middle East all this time, then it wasn’t him who called me. Even if he had the signal rerouted to hide his real location, wouldn’t he have made it look like it came from his office in DC or his official address in Virginia? Why point anyone toward a residence whose location he doesn’t want to make common knowledge?”
Sean headed toward the closet. “He wouldn’t. Only a handful of CIA people know the location of his chateau. It’s a private retreat, a place Macy owned before they got married. And that worries me.”
“Why?”
“Because Macy is T-45.”
Brynn didn’t bother to hide her surprise, but it only lasted for a split second. Her father had been T-45, and her mother had died because of his connections. While Sean was sure the rogue agency had done some good in the world, in his estimation, they’d done just as much to advance the cause of evil. They had, after all, employed Jayda, even after they’d known about her fucked-up childhood. She’d been a highly effective assassin, but every kill had cost her a tiny piece of her soul.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” Brynn said.
“You and me both, sister. I think it’s time we head to France.”
“You know the location of the chateau?”
Sean flung open the closet doors and pawed through the hanging garments until he found a well-worn brown leather jacket that looked to be about his size. “I was best man at their wedding, so I’m one of the few people who knows how to get there and, even more importantly, how to bypass the security once we’re on the grounds. Hey, I thought you said this house used to be owned by a woman?”
Brynn helped him remove the coat from the hanger so he could try it on. “Luckily for both of us, she wasn’t an ordinary woman.”
Two months ago, the fit would have been snug, but even with his renewed workout schedule, Sean had lost just enough muscle mass for it to fit like a glove. “You realize that when we add all of this up—the bug, the surveillance, the wonky communications—we get a compromised mission. You’re not beholden to Dante anymore.”
“I know,” Brynn replied, holding tight to the sides of his jacket so that he was certain her hands would carry the imprint of the zipper. “But I think I would have switched allegiance, anyway. You have a right to know who took you and why. You have a right to know if the woman you once loved is still alive.”
Her voice tripped a little over the last part but not enough so that anyone else would have noticed. It scared the shit out of Sean that he was so in tune with Brynn after so short a time, but when a woman saved your life, nursed you back to health and then enhanced your recovery with lovemaking that took into account your every ache and pain, a bond formed.
One that wouldn’t be easily broken, though Sean was pretty sure he’d do a fine job of fucking it up at some point—some point soon. But hopefully, not before she helped him get the hell out of here.
Well aware of covert operation protocols, Sean could all but guarantee that in addition to the ill-placed listening devices and high-powered binoculars, whoever was watching them was likely employing heat-sensitive spyware to track their movements through the villa walls. Once they both dressed in layers of clothes that would protect them from the chillier temperatures in France and threw a couple of essentials into lightweight go-bags, he adjusted the stereo to an acoustic guitar recording and danced Brynn from the bedrooms toward the center of the house.
He made sure the music was blaring outside, too. If their watchers thought they were enjoying just another romantic evening together, they might win the few seconds of surprise that they needed to get away without a fight.
“This is ridiculous,” she said as Sean twirled her around her bedroom to the strains of a particularly sensual salsa.
Holding her in his arms, he was keenly aware of Brynn’s increasing impatience. The open, adventurous, free lover he’d known hours ago was now out of his reach, closeted behind the efficient, slightly cool professional he’d first met.
“I’ve done worse things than dance while plotting an escape,” he confessed.
His lighthearted response fell flat. She didn’t resist when he gave her a gentle push away from him and then reeled her back into his arms, but she did skewer him with cynical eyes. “We don’t know for sure that they’re watching us with thermal imaging.”
He tugged her a little closer, aware that the longer she had to stew with the knowledge that she’d been duped, the angrier she would become. She’d risked her life for a lie—and now she was doing it again for a lover she barely knew.
“Trust me, they’re watching. The minute we make a break for it, they’re going to swarm this house like mosquitoes on a hot summer night.”
She smirked and her eyes twinkled with a wicked glint that sent a rush of heat straight to his groin. “You don’t think it will be that easy to get in here, do you? Or out, for that matter. You never actually tried to escape, you know.”
To punish her sauciness—and prove he had more up his sleeve than she expected—he pulled her against him and executed three tight turns in time with the bolero beat. Centrifugal forces pressed their bodies even closer together. When he stopped, he took advantage of her disorientation and kissed her.
He expected resistance, but again, she surprised him. She grabbed the sides of his face and deepened the kiss until he was the one with a tentative hold on his equilibrium.
“So,” he said, pulling away before he lost sight of their plan to leave now while it was dark and their watchers thought they were headed toward the bedroom rather than an exit. “We’re packed and packing.” He shoved her to his left so that the holsters they’d strapped on underneath their jackets nearly collided. “But the driveway leads to the only road off this hill, and chances are, they’re down there, waiting for me to make a break.”
Her lips pressed tightly together. “They’re not expecting both of us. Besides, we’re not going to drive down the hill. For one, we don’t have a car. For another, I’d like to avoid a confrontation on the off chance those guys are working for Dante and were only supposed to provide me backup in case you gave me any trouble.”
Sean couldn’t contain a grin. “I guess they really suck at their jobs.”
She rolled her eyes. “You were planning an escape.”
“And you very
effectively stopped me by offering me your amazing body instead. Dante should recruit you.”
“Who says he hasn’t tried?” she responded, shifting the lead out of his control so that they danced across the main living space of the house. “But Dante is not our immediate problem. This house was left to me by someone I cared about, and I don’t want it shot up full of holes. So you keep that gun holstered unless we’re immediately threatened, understood?”
“You’re no fun,” he mock complained, though he’d also hoped to avoid gunplay or fights if possible. He wasn’t one hundred percent recovered, and though Brynn had a mean roundhouse kick, she wasn’t a trained covert operative. Unlike most of the female spies he knew, Brynn had mainstream standards and morals—possibly even a code of behavior that reached beyond doing whatever it took to get a job done.
Yet another aspect of her personality that made them incompatible.
The song they’d been dancing to ended. Brynn slipped out of his arms. “Are you sure you’re up to this? We could stay here until you’re stronger. With more time, we can figure out what’s really going on. Face things directly.”
He shook his head. “This world doesn’t work that way. You know it doesn’t. If we want the truth, we have to go in sideways. Trust me.”
“Why should I? You’re leaving to look for another woman. A woman who not only hurt you but who was responsible for your pain.”
“I never said—”
She flattened her palm over his mouth. “You didn’t have to say anything. I know what you went through. I changed your bandages and worried about every single wound. You may be willing to go through all of that again to find out if she’s alive, but what if I’m not? And what if you do find her and then leave me to clean up the mess? You’re all charm and sex appeal now, Sean, but I’m not a fool. I know what you’re capable of.”
