None of us fail to notice his particular emphasis on family tradition.
“Okay,” says Mellie, her tone sharpening slightly. “I never asked for a spot on your family’s yacht. I came along to keep up appearances and have some fun. But your father had to deal with some business for a while, so it’ll just be you and me in the race. Will that be a problem, Jamison?”
The stormy look on his face indicates that he’s going to be on the Claire either without her or not at all. I have to do something before he decides to leave the marina or, worse, tries to get his stepmother kicked out. I’m improvising, deviating from the script, but this is the perfect opportunity for us to get closer.
And I have to know if it was all in my head or not.
“Come on,” I say, pulling away from Romeo and taking Jamie’s arm. “I need a cocktail, and you look like you need... something stronger.”
After a tense moment, Jamie allows me to lead him over to the bartender. As he orders a mojito and a double whiskey on the rocks, I take a seat on a barstool, swiveling around to watch the crowd waiting for the sailing race to begin. If I squint just right, I can almost convince myself that I really am Lily Bass, that I don’t have an aberration, that this is just another day in my perfectly normal life.
“For the lady,” says Jamie, handing me a tall glass garnished with fresh mint leaves. He sits down next to me and takes a large gulp of his whiskey, then glances sideways at me. “Sorry about that. I find it extremely difficult to be polite to my stepmother. Most people are fooled by her demeanor, but they’ve never seen her screaming and flinging priceless antiques at my father. If she had her way, the Claire would be in ashes by now. At least I’ll never have to see her again after the divorce.”
“Wow.” I take an equally large swallow of my mojito, the intense flavor of mint and rum and lime sending a shiver down my spine. “I guess I’m lucky my dad never remarried after my mom died.”
He looks at me, surprised. “I didn’t know that.”
“That my dad didn’t marry anyone else?”
“No. That your mother died.”
I shrug casually, as if I didn’t know that was what he meant. “It happened when I was really young. I don’t remember her well, but my dad always said she was the best thing ever.”
Jamie nods, his features relaxing. “That’s a nice sentiment. I only met Charles once, but he was still wearing his wedding ring.”
“I wear hers all the time,” I say, showing him a golden ring on a chain around my neck. “I know it’s silly, but I feel like she’s watching over me. It makes me feel closer to her, you know?”
He doesn’t answer at first, and I’m not sure whether to keep going or just give up on this line of conversation entirely. But he’s only setting down his drink on the bar to unclasp a silver watch on his wrist. He shows me an engraving on the back, our heads leaning close together to read the etched words.
For my dearest son, Jamie.
“I know,” he says.
When I lift my gaze, he’s smiling at me with this look in his eyes, like we’re the only two people in the world. I find myself giving him a genuine smile in return. Mentioning my mother wasn’t in the script for today, and I wasn’t even supposed to leave Romeo’s side until the grand finale. But somehow Jamie and I are connecting, really connecting, with such ease that it’s almost unsettling.
It wasn’t in my head after all.
“Well,” he says, leaning back against the bar. “This is refreshing. Most girls would be cooing over me by now, practically on the verge of weeping over my dead mother.”
“I’m not most girls,” I say, setting down my mojito and picking up his drink instead. Maintaining eye contact, I drink the rest of his whiskey all at once, ignoring the stinging in my throat.
Shit. I didn’t expect it to be this strong.
Jamie grins, returning to his normal self. “Suddenly it doesn’t seem so bad if I’m not on that yacht after all.” He signals to the bartender, who seems to understand that he wants two shot glasses filled with whiskey. “Cheers.”
We down our shots together, both of us still smiling, but I’m starting to feel tipsy. What am I doing? I’m not the kind of operative who can pull off a mission while intoxicated. I was supposed to stick to the plan instead of running off with Jamie. But Romeo and Mellie are already boarding the Claire, preparing to sail away together, and it’s like my fellow operative has forgotten about me entirely.
Following my gaze, Jamie says, “So what happened to our date, Lily? I have to admit I was surprised when you showed up here with Lawrence Fisher.”
I shrug. “I was pretty freaked out by what happened, but you never tried to call me. I thought you weren’t interested.”
“You disappeared on me,” he says. “I thought you needed time.”
“No way.” On impulse, I wave a hand at the bartender, who pours us another two shots. “I needed to keep going.”
“With me?” asks Jamie. He nods in the direction of Romeo. “Or with him?”
“Lawrence is a former classmate of mine,” I say, reciting from the script. “My dad wanted me to ask him to invest in his business. It’s the reason I went to your party.”
Jamie lets out a laugh. “Good luck with that. Lawrence won’t stop hovering around my father’s company.”
“Ophidian?” I ask, startled. Romeo and I haven’t been discussing it at all. Why wouldn’t he have mentioned this to me when we were planning the mission?
“So you’ve heard of it,” says Jamie, looking amused. He reaches over the bar and grabs the bottle of whiskey, dropping a hundred-dollar bill in its place, then offers me his hand. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
I don’t even hesitate. His fingers feel warm and soothing, unlike Reese’s electric but too-tight grip. This I want. This I will gladly accept more of, no matter the cost.
As if we’re children playing tag, we sneak around the bar and head for the shoreline, darting away from the marina, laughing like accomplices who just got away with highway robbery. Normally I would still be acting at this point, focusing on getting closer to my target and making him believe in the possibility of love, but I’m no longer acting. Not at all.
“This is my favorite place in all the world,” says Jamie.
“The ocean?” I ask, a laugh escaping me.
“No,” he says, grinning at the delight on my face. “The lighthouse.”
I’m saved only by my instinct to freeze every aspect of my reaction. My feet stumble to a halt on the shoreline as I blink at Jamie, trying not to look terrified. There it is, a short distance away, overlooking the blue waters of the ocean. An old lighthouse with a “NO TRESPASSING” sign in front of it.
The place where Alpha is watching over us with his sniper rifle.
“But the sailing race,” I say slowly. “Isn’t it starting soon?”
“Who cares?” he says. “I want to show you the lighthouse.”
“But we’re trespassing—”
“Of course we are, Eliza.” Jamie swings around to look straight at me. He’s using my supposedly fake name to make a point, but he doesn’t know it’s my real one, arresting me completely, making me want to hear it again. “Are you in, or are you out?”
I stare back at Jamison Hart, forcing myself to keep breathing evenly. This is it. My target’s favorite place in the entire world, and he’s taking me there while I’m supposed to be on a date with another man. If I back out now, I’ll be rejecting him and this place, and he’ll have no interest in me anymore. Even now, he’s on the verge of exasperation. He clearly didn’t expect me to hesitate. And if my partner wasn’t up there, I’d already be sprinting to the lighthouse, our own private race on the shoreline.
“Oh, I’m in,” I say lightly, pulling free of him.
Without looking back, I start toward the lighthouse, hoping desperately that Alpha has noticed us and abandoned his position. Just in case, I reach into my purse and flip open the compact mirror, initia
ting a video call with my index finger so he’ll at least hear us talking and know it means danger.
Jamie catches up and spins me around to face him, our lips close enough for a kiss. “Are you sure you’re in? Because you were looking pretty close to Lawrence Fisher when you first arrived.”
I allow myself a small smile internally. “I didn’t think you saw me arrive.”
“Oh, I saw you,” he says. It’s obvious from his tone and expression that he hated seeing me with Romeo, almost as much as he hated seeing his stepmother.
“Then let’s go,” I say, breaking eye contact with Jamie before he can lean any closer. As we enter the old lighthouse, I climb the rickety wooden steps ahead of him, our voices echoing off the moss-covered walls. “So how long have you been coming here?”
“Ever since I was a kid,” he says, from a few steps behind me. “This is where I went when my father pissed me off so badly that I wanted to run away. I always thought it would scare him, you know? Seeing as how my mother drowned in the ocean.” His hand clenches into a fist. “But even though I’d almost drowned as well when I tried to save her, he never cared where I had gone.”
Out of nowhere, a gunshot cracks through the air, making the blood chill inside my veins. Did Alpha just snipe someone from the lighthouse? I’ve had too many drinks all at once to think straight. As if nothing just happened, I climb the rest of the way to the top, my heart pounding loudly in my ears. Run, August...
But there’s no one else up here.
“Did you hear that?” Jamie strides over to a window and sets down the bottle of whiskey, gazing out at the ocean. In the distance, the crowd is piling onto the dock, cheering as sailboats and yachts begin to move across the water. Someone must have fired a blank from a pistol to signal the start of the race.
“Hear what?” I ask, still distracted. Where has my partner gone?
“A gunshot,” he says. “For a moment there, I thought someone was going to die again.”
I give a small laugh. “I’m sure that won’t happen—”
But I’m interrupted by a loud explosion from outside. The shock of the blast reaches the shoreline and shakes the lighthouse, sending me tumbling against Jamie without warning. He holds onto me tightly, his expression darkening as screams fill the air below. I follow his gaze to the marina.
Out on the waves, a yacht has burst into flames. My heart seizes inside my chest as Jamie says something to me, but I can’t process anything other than the burning wreckage on the debris-littered water. I can see the name of the yacht painted onto the splintered hull even from here, and it means something has gone wrong with the mission yet again.
Claire.
ten
“What did you just do?”
I slam my hand flat against Romeo’s chest and shove him against the wall inside the safe house. He looks only mildly surprised, as if I didn’t just show up at the front door practically breathing fire. If I were more sober, I would have asked Uncle to take me back to the Executive instead. But I’m pissed off that Reese went even more off-script than I did, to the point of screwing with my mission again. I’m so angry I can barely see straight.
“What do you think I was doing?” he says, moving past me into the kitchen. The safe house is a loft apartment in the middle of the city, with a luxurious sofa and oversized windows and hardwood floors. At least he knows how to be an asshole in style. “I was taking out my target.”
“And what about mine?” I follow him over to the stainless steel counter, still seething as he uncaps a bottle of gin and pours two drinks into cocktail glasses. “How am I supposed to get closer to Jamison Hart if he’s in jail? How am I supposed to comfort him at his stepmother’s funeral if there’s not going to be one?”
“I’m sure you’ll find a way,” he says, flashing a tired smirk at me.
Everything happened so fast when Jamie and I returned to the marina. We confirmed that the Claire had exploded, killing Mellie Hart and Lawrence Fisher. Their bodies had been carried away by the ocean current and likely wouldn’t be found for a while, if ever. A number of other participants in the sailing race had suffered injuries from the shrapnel, but at least no one else had died.
Jamison Hart and his father were both primary suspects, each having backed out of the sailing race at the last minute.
The police took Jamie away before he could register what was going on. I had to fake a panic attack to be brought to an ambulance off to the side, away from the witnesses and reporters and cameras, where I gave a statement to a police officer. He seemed to believe my story. I mean, I didn’t have to work that hard to seem emotional and confused. My fake identity would hold up under investigation, but I had no sense of where August was at the time. And, of course, I still thought Reese was dead.
When Uncle finally found me, I was sitting on my own behind the ambulance, staring at my silent phone.
In the limousine on the way here, Uncle told me the basics of what really happened. More of the plan had been changed than I was told. Romeo intentionally took Jamison Hart’s place on the Claire and jumped overboard just before the explosion went off, faking his own death while allowing Mellie Hart to die. Then he swam out to a hidden cove, where Alpha was waiting with a motorboat to take him to the safe house.
I wasn’t mad at Uncle. I wasn’t even mad at Alpha, who hadn’t told me any of this beforehand. No, I’d reserved all my anger and judgment for this moment, when I’d inevitably confront Romeo, the one person responsible for coordinating with me on this mission.
“You really are surprised, aren’t you?” He leans against the counter and downs his entire drink all at once. I reach for the other glass, but his hand shoots out and grips my wrist. “Have you heard of Mongoose?”
“No.” I grab the bottle with my free hand and take a huge gulp, barely registering the fact that he’s touching me.
Before I can stop him, Reese seizes my waist and draws me against his body. His lips find my ear and murmur, “I need to check for bugs, and then I’ll tell you what you want to know. Is that good enough to keep you from losing control?”
My instinct is to push him away, but I’m still intoxicated and I want to know everything. I want to know exactly what happened and why.
And I’ve already lost control.
Without stopping to think, I reach up to the back of Reese’s neck, then lean up and press my lips against his, hard, releasing all the pent-up yearning and desire I’ve ever felt into the kiss. Oh, I think. So this is what I’ve been missing.
It feels like an explosion.
Reese is already kissing me back, our mouths consuming each other hungrily, as if this is what we’ve been waiting for our entire lives. He’s won the game to get me to kiss him after all. This feels incredibly dangerous, like it should be forbidden, but maybe that’s just because every other person I’ve kissed has died. I’ve never even kissed anyone outside the context of a mission.
But Reese isn’t going to die, is he? Not in the yacht explosion, and certainly not now. No, I’m the one who’s on the edge and so close to death, because all these electric sensations streaking across my skin are making me feel as if I want to die. There’s no way my body can handle this much sensation. It’s already overloading, electrocuting, shorting out. I can’t think about anything other than prolonging this kiss and finally being with someone in whatever capacity I want.
His hand reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small device, but I don’t pay any attention. I’m too busy pressing myself against his body, wanting more, more, not just this. His tongue finds mine and I can feel his sharp canine teeth grazing dangerously against my lips, but he doesn’t bite. Normally I would be pulling back by now, making some kind of excuse to get away before I have to watch the other person convulse to death before my eyes.
But this? This I could revel in forever.
Romeo catches my lower lip gently with his teeth, cautioning me to be still for a moment, and then I hear it. A series of four pops arou
nd the safe house. One in the ceiling light, one in the television, one in the front door, and one in the bedroom. Four bugs have just been shorted out.
This is the part where I should pull away and demand to know what he wants to tell me. But I don’t, and he doesn’t, and we resume our kissing immediately, more intensely this time, as if we’re lovers who have been apart for years with both of us starving for the other. The feeling of his mouth against mine is going to absolutely ruin me, because I’m never going to want to emerge from this and face the reality of my own life. His lips don’t leave mine, and mine don’t leave his, not even when his fingers find their way underneath my dress and trace up my thigh, higher and higher, until they’re inside my panties, matching the rhythm of our kissing.
As if of their own volition, my own fingers swiftly unbutton his wet shirt, splaying across his firm muscles, feeling every rise and fall of his chest. I’ve almost never gone this far with anyone before, and it’s insane how good it feels, like my brain is blasting off firework after firework of endorphins. He lifts me onto the counter, his fingers plunging deep inside me, his thumb drawing me even closer.
But that’s when he bites my lower lip, harder than anyone ever has before, drawing blood instantly. I can feel a shot of venom enter my system. I’m not going to die because of it, obviously. I’m an aberrant who’s immune to poison, which is one of the reasons why I’m different and what has kept me from being normal, from being able to do things like this, for my entire life. It shouldn’t matter that he just injected me with a toxic substance.
But the shock of it is what finally jolts me out of his arms.
I shove Reese away and stumble off the counter, gasping, putting distance between us, my lips swollen to the point of almost feeling numb. My body protests weakly, but no part of me wants to keep going anymore. This can’t happen between us, not like this, because none of it is what I wanted. Every kiss I’ve ever had has ended in pain.
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