by Julie Leto
Did she? Did she really? He doubted it. If she truly comprehended how far he was willing to go to get the information he wanted, she’d run so fast in the other direction even a hungry jaguar couldn’t catch up to her.
Up until this moment, Sean Devlin thought he knew everything he needed to know about himself. He knew he could love. He knew he could hate. He knew he could kill and live with no regrets. But was he truly capable of sacrificing Brynn for the ghost of a woman who’d left him behind and who might not even exist anymore?
He supposed he was about to find out.
Eleven
Brynn understood that Sean meant to alleviate her misgivings, but the admission that he’d leave her to pursue a woman who’d let him believe she was dead cut through her heart like a scalpel.
It shouldn’t have hurt. They were nothing to each other. So what if she’d saved his life? So what if they’d become lovers? Ultimately, they were players in a game of intrigue that neither of them could win if they didn’t get out of the villa undetected.
As Dante had not responded to her multiple attempts at communication, Brynn had no reason to trust that the people watching them were under his control. Until she knew otherwise, she was going to take Sean at his word and act on the information they had rather than on blind loyalty to a man she hadn’t seen in years. Dante had failed to contact her. For all she knew, he’d been neutralized. The wisest course of action was for Sean to fall further off the grid—and for her to go with him.
Once out of sight, they could turn up the heat on Dante. They’d travel to the French chateau that had been the site of Dante’s wedding and start their search for him there. Though the location had been a carefully guarded secret, Sean could get them there. Once they obtained false documents to get over the border, a task that fell to Brynn.
A month ago, Brynn would have looked forward to seeing Dante again, even after he sent her on a dangerous mission to retrieve a man whose half brother had caused her a great deal of emotional pain. Bugged take-out containers and a blockade on communication had changed all that. Brynn would have told him anything he wanted to know if he’d only answered her calls.
Unless he didn’t trust her.
But then, why ask for her help in the first place?
Brynn understood that to Dante, she had been a means to an end. Sean, on the other hand, was his friend. She understood the difficulty of maintaining close, personal ties with someone in the business of subterfuge, but the two men had managed it. She couldn’t discount the power of that kind of bond—it was the kind of power that could burn her to a crisp.
After grabbing their bags, they ascended a spiral staircase tucked in a corner of the villa’s living room. At the top, Sean pressed Brynn up against the wall so that the full length of his body molded against hers.
“Again I’ll remind you,” she said, trying to remember the correct sequence of letters, numbers and symbols that would allow them entrance to the secret room despite the distraction of Sean’s pelvis flush with her backside. “We can probably drop the continuous seduction ruse. We don’t know for sure that they’re watching us with thermal imaging equipment.”
“They are,” he assured.
“How do you know?”
“SOP,” he replied. “If those agents work for Dante, they’re going to use heat-sensitive tracking when they don’t have physical eyes on us.”
“What if they don’t work for Dante?”
“You said you took every precaution to make sure we weren’t followed when you came here.”
Within the cramped confines of the landing, she turned around to face him. The move, meant to assure him that she’d done everything in her power to ensure their safety, was a mistake. They were too close, and the memory of their sexual compatibility was too fresh.
Her body reacted with an instant, powerful quivering that she could not afford to feel. Not now. Potentially, never again.
“We were not followed,” she assured him.
“Then the men watching us are doing so on Dante’s orders. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter who they are. The minute we disappear into that safe room, they’re going to storm this place.”
Brynn took a deep breath, pushed aside the effects of her vibrating nerve endings and keyed in the security code. “The minute we disappear behind this door, a series of very nasty security measures activate throughout the property. Storming this place won’t be half as easy as they think it will be.”
She wasn’t lying—and Sean hadn’t exaggerated. A half minute after Brynn set the locking sequence, alarms squealed, screeched and whooped until she was scrambling to turn off the sounds inside the command center before they went deaf.
Brynn had never put Yizenia’s intricate security systems through a full test, but she knew from checking each individual sequence that upon activation, every metal surface in the place would go hot. The gate at the end of the drive, the grate at the front door and various sections of floor, including the spiral staircase that led to the safe room, would sizzle with twenty thousand volts of electricity. Bright lights would turn the house into a veritable beacon, blinding anyone wearing night vision goggles and making normal sight hard to endure.
There were also booby traps she’d rather not think about.
If the watchers had any sense whatsoever, they’d stand down long enough to assess what they were up against. This would give Brynn and Sean their window of escape.
Together, they descended beyond the ground floor, basement and sub-basement via a ladder that ran inside a lead-lined, load-bearing wall. A fortified tunnel took them to the edge of the property line, where they squeezed through an access port and crossed a section of sewer until they crawled from a removable grate at the edge of the tiny town.
One stolen car later and they were free.
“That was easy,” Sean said as Brynn drove.
She smirked but didn’t reply. He was in no shape for conversation, even if the only sign of distress was excessive sweat dripping down the sides of his face, which he wiped away with a towel he found in the backseat of the pilfered coupe. It was one thing to screw like rabbits on plush mattresses or polished kitchen tables—but it was something else to scurry like hunted rodents down narrow crawlspaces and confined passageways.
But they were out, and from what Brynn could gauge through her regular checks in the rearview mirror, they’d escaped unnoticed.
When they hit the next village, they switched cars. They picked up a burner phone at a tourist shop near the coast and then drove through the night until they neared a town close to the border where Brynn had a contact.
“I should call that boat captain again,” Brynn mused, having turned over the driving duties to Sean. He’d slept and had awoken reinvigorated, though he winced whenever he made sharp turns.
“Dante probably knows all about him by now,” Sean said. “We’ve got to go underground. Think like criminals.”
“I’m not a criminal,” Brynn insisted. She’d never minded bending a few statutes here and there for a case, but she couldn’t deny that with Sean’s half brother, she’d crossed a line—one she was terrified she would face again before this mission was over.
The thought made her long to call her brother. The untraceable cell burned in her hand, but she made the mistake of voicing her craving aloud.
Sean frowned. “I thought you liked your brother.”
“I do. And I trust him. He could help.”
Six months ago, her answer would have been different. But they’d spent the holidays out in the middle of the ocean, forced to deal with the damage done to their relationship by their mother’s unfathomable murder and their father’s impossible expectations.
In a short time, they’d come a long way. If she called, Ian would drop everything to help her. But he had his own demons to deal with. He didn’t need to take on hers, too.
“And to be honest,” she continued, surrendering to an unexpected need to make this confession to someone other th
an herself, “I’m actually starting to love the smarmy bastard.”
“Then don’t drag him into this,” Sean said. “Dante probably has his lines monitored or will soon. If you give away our location, he’ll know we’re coming.”
“Won’t he know that by now anyway?”
“Maybe,” he conceded, “or he might just think I’m heading back to the States.”
Brynn smirked. “I expect that Dante Burke knows you as well as you know him. Would he really think you’re going to leave Europe and head home without getting answers?”
“Never in a million years.”
The conversation ended. Brynn opted to keep her brother in the dark, and Sean opted to concentrate on the road. They alternated between highway and back roads, stretching the five-and-a-half-hour drive to nearly eight. By the time the gray sky lightened as the sunrise was smothered by storm clouds, they’d stopped at an inn outside of the coastal city and booked a room.
By noon, Brynn’s contact arrived, took their photos, charged extra to make Sean’s look as if it hadn’t been taken four weeks after a severe beating, and promised to deliver exceptional passports by the next day. So in the grand tradition of men and women on the run, they pretended to be newlyweds and sequestered themselves in their room.
Sean fell asleep before his head hit the pillow. Unwilling to torture herself with watching his chest rise and fall for hours on end, Brynn dragged a wingback chair near the window and, by the meager sunlight, tapped into a nearby wireless signal and programmed her laptop to breach a secure backdoor entrance she’d designed herself into the secure Titan International system.
She set a timer. She had no idea if Dante’s people were trolling the vast Internet for a signal that could be traced back to her, but she wasn’t taking any chances. She searched the company’s database for intelligence on the man himself, backdating her exploration so that it would look as if she’d searched before she took orders from him rather than after.
She supposed she should have done this before or since, but she hadn’t thought it necessary. When he’d called her, she’d known who he was and what he was capable of. Up until the moment she’d found the listening device in her take-out carton, she’d thought he’d been on her side.
Now, she wasn’t so sure.
Unfortunately, her search revealed nothing earth-shattering, though she did learn that he’d only recently been reinstalled as a CIA division director after the death of his predecessor, Abercrombie Finch. She’d had no clue that he’d ever left the CIA, and nothing she found hinted at why he’d gone back. The name Abercrombie Finch sounded familiar, but as she wasn’t going to waste her limited online time on a man who was dead, she decided not to investigate him.
Since Sean had mentioned Dante’s wife, she did risk a few more minutes online looking for Macy Rush. Searches about her came up empty—as if she didn’t exist—which, Brynn supposed, was par for the course in the world of counterintelligence.
She’d just logged out of the computer when Sean asked, “How long have you been using that signal?”
She looked up, surprised by how dark the room had become. “My system automatically logs in and out at random intervals. It even switches wireless signals from time to time and scrambles the information I’ve accessed over several continents. It slows everything down to a crawl, but it’s impossible to trace.”
He pulled himself up to a sitting position and ran his hands through his wildly disheveled hair. “You shouldn’t take unnecessary chances.”
“Said the pot to the kettle,” Brynn replied.
He ignored her joke. “What were you looking for?”
She slid the laptop onto the tiny round table, nearly knocking over the delicate lamp. “What do you think I’m looking for?”
“Intel about me?”
She snorted. “What do you think I was doing during those two weeks when all you did was sleep? I wasn’t looking up recipes.”
“You cook?” he asked skeptically.
“No,” she snapped, “which explains why I didn’t spend those endless hours perusing food porn sites. I was reading anything and everything I could find about you.”
“That must have been boring,” he said.
“There wasn’t enough information about you to qualify as boring, but I got a general sense of you, I think.”
“Enough to get you to trust me?”
Brynn slid onto the bed beside him. “My trust in you pretty much defies logic.”
She’d spent hours fighting her instinct to crawl onto the mattress with him. He’d done the last round of driving and had needed to shut down and reboot his still-healing system.
Now, however, he was rested. And rumpled. And warm. She wanted to put aside everything she’d learned about spies and secret agencies and fake passports and border crossings and lose herself in Sean.
The closer she scooted, the wider he grinned.
“Something you want, Ms. Blake?” he asked.
She stopped her forward momentum. “Only if there’s something you’d like to give.”
And luckily for her, there was.
Do you want to be the first to know what Sean gives Brynn? What happens when they cross the border? If Jayda is still alive and why sadistic thugs are looking for her?
Find out in DIRTY DARE: The Reveal…coming soon!
If you want to be notified when the story is released, please sign up for my newsletter or subscribe to my website: www.julieleto.com.
Afterword
Dear Reader,
Thank you so much for purchasing a copy of DIRTY DARE: Part One, The Rescue. I hope you enjoyed meeting Sean and Brynn or maybe becoming reacquainted with them from previous stories. Independent publishing has given me the freedom to do some experimental storytelling, so I hope you’re on board! I know the story is on the shorter side, but it is meant to be. Readers consistently ask me to publish more often and putting out this serialized novel in three parts is one way I can meet that request.
If you’re wondering about the stories connections, DIRTY DARE: The Rescue is a bridge story, meant to connect my sexy suspense novella, DARE ME, with my Dirty series, which includes DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS, DIRTY LITTLE LIES (which is where you’ll meet Sean’s half brother) and DIRTY LITTLE CHRISTMAS. All these stories are available at Amazon and I’ve included links below if you’d like to check them out—and I hope you do!
I will release DIRTY DARE: Part Two, The Reveal soon! I’m also working on TALK DIRTY TO ME, which will be a full-length novel about Marisela’s so-called “easy job” working for her parents’ church. With Marisela, nothing with her is ever easy…which is why I love writing about her.
In the meantime, I would truly appreciate it if you would take a moment to go to Amazon and leave an honest review of this story or any others of mine that you’ve read. It only a takes a moment and it is very helpful in spreading the word to other readers!
To make sure you’re among the first to know when the next installment is out, please visit my website www.julieleto.com and sign up for my newsletter.
Happy reading!
Other Works by Julie Leto
New York Times bestselling author, JULIE LETO
Dare Me
(Sexy Suspense Novella)
Given the choice between great sex and saving the world…why not do both?
Praise for Dare Me…
“Dante is uber male, sexy, smart, full of himself yet underneath it all he knows he screwed up and wants to get Macy back. Sigh. This is a hot, fun quick read.”
Brenda
Goodreads
“Moved really fast and full of smart characters.”
Elizabeth Brown
Blogging by Liza
“Steamy hot…”
Diana Ketterer
All About Romance
OVERVIEW
—A female James Bond submits to seduction to save the world
—A suave super-spy risks everything to win back the woman he betrayed<
br />
—Can they learn to trust each other again to stop a massive terrorist attack?
Buy Dare Me with your e-ink Kindle
Buy Dare Me with your Kindle Fire or Kindle App
Dirty Little Secrets
(Sexy Suspense)
Book One
Sex, lies and lethal weapons…
Praise for Dirty Little Secrets…
“Stephanie Who? Readers looking for a genuine and credible bad-ass kick-butt heroine may want to check this book out.”
Mrs. Giggles
“Readers who love a great kickass heroine, propulsive action and plenty of steam shouldn’t miss Dirty Little Secrets.”
Leigh Thomas
All About Romance
“Get out the ice and set your fans on high! Julie Leto’s Dirty Little Secrets will set you on fire the minute you pick up this steamy, high-speed book of love, action, and adventure.”
Anne Lum
Writer’s Unlimited
OVERVIEW:
—A disgraced bounty hunter pursues her sexy ex
—The secret agent on the run catapults her into his treacherous underworld
—Is her super-sexy lover her ticket out of a mundane world—or is he setting her up to crash and burn?
Buy Dirty Little Secrets with your e-ink Kindle
Buy Dirty Little Secrets with your Kindle Fire or Kindle App
Dirty Little Lies
(Sexy Suspense)
Book Two
Staying alive isn’t easy when people with guns tell Dirty Little Lies…
Praise for Dirty Little Lies…
“A must read for anyone enjoying a little female butt-kicking with a little flare.”
C.J. Yasay
Bookstove
“Leto’s style is fast, breezy and loaded with tension. She’s created a complex plot that’s executed with precision. Her characters have no middle ground and are worth a second look.”
Donna M. Brown
RT Bookreviews
