by Nana Malone
“That’s a beautiful story.”
“Yeah, it is. Just… You doing this reminds me of that.”
“So that’s a good memory, right?”
I nodded with a smile and then started walking again. “Yeah, it’s a good memory. They passed away when I was eighteen, so it’s bittersweet.”
“Shit. I’m so sorry.”
“No, you’re fine. I guess I never told you that.”
He shook his head. “No. But do you see what I mean? We’re going to have to do our first and second date, at the very least, all over again.”
I laughed. “You’re not what I expected.”
“Well, neither are you. Which I’m pretty sure is fantastic.”
“You’re more stubborn than I thought. Chivalrous, yes, but a little commanding. You like to be in charge. You are concerned about my safety. It’s nice to be worried about.”
He grinned. “Who doesn’t like to be in charge?”
“I don’t know, someone out there over the rainbow, I guess.”
He chuckled. “Those aren’t the words.”
I shrugged. “I know that.”
He lifted a brow. “Do you?”
At the light, he took my hand and we crossed the street. I expected him to let it go, but he didn’t. A zing of electricity shot up my arm, making my body vibrate and my thighs clench together as something pulled deep and low in my belly. “So, we’re holding hands now?”
“Yep. I decided I wanted to hold your hand on the second date, but then obviously we were interrupted.”
I wrinkled my nose and laughed. “Oh God. Because of your food poisoning. I’m so sorry. That sushi restaurant was supposed to be the best.”
His brow furrowed. “Yeah, you know I’m not opposed to trying it again.”
I laughed and shook my head. “No, no, no, no. Don’t you get that thing where if something makes you sick you can never look at it again?”
He shook his head. “No. Because what if you’re wrong about the thing that made you sick?”
“No, really, we don’t have to.”
He laughed. “Well, for you I’d be willing to risk it. And I do want to finish that bowling match. Although you were kicking my arse.”
“I was, wasn’t I?”
His laugh was deep and rich, and to me it felt like a sip of smoky brandy by the fire on a cold night. It was the most outstanding thing I’d ever heard in my life.
“I was letting you win.”
“You were not,” I squeaked out with a laugh.
God, this was dating? This was nice. Why had I been avoiding it?
You know why.
Yes, I did know why. Fucking Tyler Warden. To be fair, the disaster of that relationship was mostly my fault. I’d believed him and his lies. I should have known better. After all, wasn’t that what all that training with Roz was for? So I’d be able to spot people like him? The pretenders?
But this was different. Marcus Black was different. Just a normal guy. A video game designer who liked holding my hand and wanted me to keep kicking his ass at bowling. I could do this.
And besides, he made me feel alive. Really alive, not that sort of adrenaline-numbed feeling like when I was on a mission. He made me want to laugh properly and do silly things. Was this that balance everyone kept speaking of?
Must be.
As we approached my building, I tried to extricate my hand, but he held on. “What, embarrassed to be seen with me?”
I started to laugh. “Oh God, it’s not that. I can see the girls running out now to ogle you. You’re very handsome, but I think you know that already.”
He just gave me a lopsided grin, a flash of white teeth, his stubble making him look even sexier. It wasn’t fair. “I’d like to meet your work friends, but maybe after we go on a couple dates first. In case they’re crazy.”
I laughed. “My best friend Addie, she is crazy. But no, I’m not embarrassed, I promise. It’s just… We’re not dating.”
“Yes, we are. We’re even holding hands, look.” He held our intertwined hands up when I shook my head.
“God, you’re so annoying—”
“Lyra?”
I whipped around, my hand still intertwined with Marcus’s. And my stomach dropped. I dropped his hand immediately and swallowed hard. “Tyler. What, um… What are you doing here?”
His gaze flickered from me to Marcus, narrowed slightly, and then settled back onto my hand that had just been intertwined with Marcus’s. “Well, I guess Roz didn’t tell you. Given the shift with the new clients, I’ve been transferred here indefinitely.”
At that dropped bomb, my stomach snapped back into place, but this time it tossed and splashed bile, which crawled up my throat begging to be expelled. I swallowed again, trying to keep it all down, push it down like my feelings about this whole fucked-up situation. Why would Roz not tell me?
“Oh. I wasn’t aware. It’s busy season, you know, with all the award shows coming up.”
He grinned. “Yeah. You know I love nothing more than giving a starlet what she wants.”
“Right, starlets, of course. Well, we won’t keep you.”
I thought Tyler would just go away so I could gather myself. Think, breathe, get my thoughts together for just a minute. I hadn’t seen him in over a year. He normally worked out of London since he’d been transferred after our fake relationship. We hadn’t even had an op together, which made sense because he was normally assigned as an undercover Valentine agent. His specialty was to get women to fall in love with him. That was his job. And then he got them to betray the men that they claimed to love.
But instead of opening the massive glass door and stepping inside, he turned to Marcus. “We haven’t met. Are you new here?”
Marcus watched him with narrowed eyes and crossed his arms over his massive chest. “No. I was just walking Lyra to work.”
Tyler’s brows lifted. “Oh. Well, that’s nice of you. Is that your job or something?”
Marcus didn’t take the bait. Instead, he wrapped an arm around my waist, leaned down, and said, “I’ll see you back at the flat.”
I noticed what he did there. That one line made it sound like we lived together.
I opened my mouth to correct him but noticed Tyler had adopted that same crossed-arm look. “Oh, so you’re what, together? Oh, Lyra, look at you, slumming it.”
My eyes went wide. “Excuse me?”
Tyler gave him an equal smirk. “Oh, right. Sorry. We used to date.”
Marcus just laughed smoothly. “Yeah, I gathered. Well, mate, wish I could say it was good to meet you, but I’d like to kiss my girlfriend now.”
Girlfriend. He just called me his… Oh God. I turned to stare at him, and he was giving me a look. I knew what that look meant, and I just went with it. He leaned in and brushed his lips over mine, and God, he tasted like mint and sin and sex, and he was doing me a favor.
When I parted my lips, he deepened the kiss just enough to make me want more. One sweep of his tongue to make me a promise. To make me ache. And then he pulled back. “Have a great day at work, Lyra. I’ll see you back at home, yeah?”
I was left just staring after him, my lips still tingling, my body thrumming. What just happened?
Tyler’s gaze flickered over me. “Well, will wonders never cease? You’re not the young ingenue anymore, are you? Now you look like a woman who actually knows what she’s doing. I can’t help feeling a little proud.”
I glared at him. “You had nothing to do with it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”
I turned my back on him, not waiting for him to open the heavy glass doors for me. I marched with purpose through our lobby and punched my PIN code at the inner entrance to log in to the system. The doors opened and I was free. I knew that Tyler was going to have to type his own code in, so I only had seconds to escape. Instead of waiting for the elevator, I took the stairs as quickly as I could.
And tried to tell myself I wasn’t running from
him.
* * *
Lyra
My heart pounding, my nerves shot, I tried for steadying breaths as I headed straight for Roz’s office. But she wasn’t in there.
Most of the agents were at their stations in the main bank of desks and cubicles. There were several meetings going on in the corner briefing rooms, but my mentor was nowhere to be found. Where the hell was Roz?
I’d settle for Addie right now, but I knew she’d opt to poison Tyler on the spot, and I needed answers that did not include murder at the moment. After ten minutes of searching for Roz, I had no choice but to head to my station. I was located in a semi-private corner with Addie and another field agent, Mick. Mick was on a long-term assignment in Yemen, so for the past three months, it had just been Addie and I.
My gaze bounced around the room, looking for my ill-fated ex, but there was no sign of him… or Roz. I didn’t have any other choice; I had to go about my job. I filled out reports from the mugging and continued working on a briefing about an Albanian smuggling crew until the briefing on Victus was scheduled to begin in thirty minutes.
Addie had zero chill when she found me at my desk. “Holy fuck, Lyra. Have you seen—”
I beat her to the punch. “Tyler? Yeah, I saw him as I was walking in. You know, with Marcus.”
Addie’s eyes lit up. “Marcus. As in your date, Marcus?”
“Yes. He thinks we’re dating now.”
Addie choked out a laugh. “What?”
“Yeah, I know. He thinks that last night I showed him a side of myself I never have before. Which is, of course, accurate. But now, especially since I told him I don’t think we should date, not that I didn’t want to date, he thinks we are dating. And he insisted on walking me here today, where we ran into Tyler.”
Her wide eyes bugged out in her expressive face. “Oh my God, how did that go? What did Tyler say?”
“Tyler was an asshole. He tried to posture, though for what reason I have no idea. It makes no sense. Especially after the way that ended.”
Addie just laughed. “Oh my God, it makes so much sense. He didn’t want you, but now that he sees someone else wants a toy from his toy box, he wants to pee all over it.”
“I’m not a toy. And he can fuck right off.”
Addie clapped. “Amen, sister. What are you going to do?”
I tugged on one of my curls as it tickled my ear. “I don’t know what to do. This is not how any of this is supposed to happen. I was never supposed to see him again. After all, what reason would I have to see him again? He wasn’t even stationed here, but now he’s been transferred.”
Addie winced. “Yeah, a Victus sighting, that’s kind of a big deal. As soon as you called in last night, Roz made some calls. I guess he was on the first plane.”
I slouched into my seat, trying to melt into my turquoise chair. “Fuck. I can’t stare at him all day every day.”
“Well, the difference is now you’re not pining after him.”
I frowned at her. “I was never pining.”
“Well, more along the lines of he lied to you and you believed him. And yes, that makes him a dick, but you don’t believe him anymore. And it turns out you have someone even hotter on the radar.”
“You don’t even know if he’s hotter.”
She smiled sheepishly. “I’ll have you know I had a look at your dating profile and saw who you were going out with. You know, just to double-check and make sure you were going to be okay. I ran my own background check on Marcus Black, and you’re right. He is a standup guy. One of his games is hugely popular.”
“Really?” I blinked in surprise.
She nodded. “You weren’t curious? Let me guess, you just looked at the facts. Family, friends, job. No fine details.”
“Uh, I’m not really one for video games, and I wanted to get those finer details, you know… from dating him.”
She rolled her eyes. “Sometimes you are such a traditionalist. I played his game. It’s good times. I played with Luke downstairs.”
I wrinkled my nose. Luke was a wet works specialist. Basically one of the assassins. All of us agents thought we were better than they were. We weren’t, but we liked to believe we were. The assassins were called in mostly for cleanup jobs. At least we did intelligence as well. “Ahh, Luke.”
She waved me off. “He’s just a bit of fun when I’m bored. But anyway, about your Marcus. I mean look, he is a hottie first of all. And he’s smart. And apparently he has a protective streak too.”
I smiled. “I know, right?” And despite my automatic reflex to keep myself hidden, I liked him.
“Yes. And from what I can tell, he’s unlikely to murder you when you’re sleeping. I looked into him as far back as elementary school because you know how sometimes you can tell that someone’s going to be a serial killer based on how they used to act in the schoolyard. He did once punch a boy called Jason Sims because he used a very bad word to a girl, but I only found that because it was written up.”
“You looked into his primary school in England?”
She nodded and smiled. “Yes, in this little village called Knotsworth. But he had a nice little family and everything.”
I sighed. “Addie, thank you. But you didn’t need to do that. I already looked him up.”
“Did you look at his primary school though?”
I laughed. “No, but I thank you for being extra thorough.”
“You’re welcome. What are besties for? Besides, it looks good for you to be dating. You know full well they won’t promote you to senior agent unless you look more settled. Do what you need to do.”
I winced. “Well, you don’t have to tell me twice. I know what I need to do. I just want to do it on my own timeline. Did I tell you he sort of indicated to Tyler that we were an item?”
She blinked at me. “He what?”
“Tyler was being a dick, and Marcus wrapped his arm around me and said he’d see me back at the flat, making it seem like we lived together.”
Addie’s eyes went big. “Oh my God, I’m in love with him. I’m going to have his babies. True story. Let’s be a throuple.”
I laughed. “And then he kissed me. Like not just a chaste, okay see you later, love kind of thing. More like in a hey, I’ll see you later and I plan to shag you against the wall kind of way.”
“Oh boy, first of all I love that he’s British and you’re already saying his Briticisms. Second of all, if he does shag you against the wall, can you please call me and tell me all about it? And finally, I would have killed to see the look on Tyler’s face. Killed.”
My timer went off, and I knew it was time for the Victus briefing. “Ugh, we should head down. I wanted to talk to Roz before the briefing, but I guess she’s busy.”
“She is. She was in there talking to Browning. He was shouting, as he’s prone to do, about security measures, how the hell someone found one of his agents, how the hell Victus was being allowed to run around in our backyard, and what we need to do about it.”
I frowned. “Wow, okay. So I guess everybody knows.”
“Oh hon, don’t worry about it. This isn’t on you.”
“Yeah, but I’m the one who let him get away.”
She knew better than to argue with me since I had let him get away because I’d been worried about the civilian that I was with.
“Stop worrying. They’re taking it seriously. Roz might not want you to be the one on this.”
Like hell would I sit this one out. “Oh, I’m on this. Whether she wants me or not.”
Addie sighed. She knew me.
When we reached the briefing room, Browning was already there. He marched right up to me. “You’re well, Agent Wilkinson?” William Browning was the section head of our branch of The Firm.
I nodded. “Yes, sir. I’m fine. I just wish I’d been able to bring him in last night.”
He shook his head. “You were with a civilian, yes?”
I nodded. “Yes, sir. It was either let Prochen
ko go or blow my cover.”
“You made the right decision. Roz and I were just talking about it. Come in. Take a seat. We’ll brief the rest of the team.”
I frowned at Browning’s back as he marched to the head of the table. He was being nice. He was never nice. Ever. I didn’t even think the man knew how to be nice.
There was something weird about this. Were they worried I’d been compromised?
When Roz started the meeting, she brought everyone on the team up to speed on Victus. And I surreptitiously turned around to see who was in the briefing room.
Everyone.
Jesus Christ. It was practically standing room only. So everybody was going to know that I had fucked up.
Next time don’t fuck up.
Usually I liked to have my massive fuck ups in private. Take responsibility and deal with them appropriately. But now, everyone was hearing all about my mistakes last night.
A familiar voice from somewhere near the back piped up. “Just what was Agent Wilkinson doing last night when she encountered Prochenko?”
I ground my teeth. Fucking Tyler. What in the world? Why had I ever, ever, ever thought that I cared about him?
It was Browning who answered, not Roz.
“She was off duty. Which is even more concerning. How is it that Victus knows the movement of our agents?” He clicked the button to show the next slide. “Senior management has been reviewing Agent Wilkinson’s movements over the last six weeks. Nothing untoward has occurred. She’s been following movement protocols. So this isn’t a breach. This was either luck or something larger.”
I hated that I was under constant surveillance. Only senior agents lost the big brother eye.
Roz stood up then. “Our intel indicates something larger. Victus is in the market for a weapon.”
I spoke up then. “What kind of weapon?”
“Something so new it’s not even on the market yet. The Annihilator. In essence, it sends some kind of radiation pulse that causes a rapid acceleration of charged particles. So it’s not a bullet. It’s a wave of radiation.”
