Risk of Exposure (Alpha Ops Book 6) (7 page)

Ragged breaths came from her as she urged him up. She opened her eyes to find him fishing for a condom from his pants pocket. She allowed herself a little smile. She loved a responsible, well-prepared man. When his eyes rested on hers, though, he didn’t smile back.

“You’re a bloody terrible person, you know?” he said as he took his dick in his hand.

She blinked. “What do you mean?”

“Threatening to tell your father I seduced and abandoned you.” With one thrust he was deep inside her, taking any protest from her lips. But he wouldn’t stop talking.

“Using me on the rooftop,” he whispered as he started moving, causing the most beautiful friction between their bodies.

“Blackmailing me. Pulling a gun on me.”

“Mmm-hmm,” was all she could say as she arched into a thrust that seemed to touch her whole body.

“Slicing my neck.”

But revenge would be hers. She took a breath and opened her eyes. “Stop.” She put her hands on his hips to stop his movement.

He froze. “What’s wrong?” His brow furrowed in concern. Sucker.

She took advantage of his bewilderment and slipped a thigh between his. It took all her strength to flip him. It wasn’t elegant, but it surprised the crap out of him.

“What the…?”

She straddled him and held his dick to her. “You’re a bloody terrible person, you know,” she said, mimicking an English accent. She slid him into her in one smooth stroke, making him groan.

“You followed me for days.” She raised and hesitated before lowering onto him again.

He strained to be inside her.

She slid back down. “You took photos of me, without me knowing.” She dug her nails into his hips, feeling what
had
been manufactured outrage turning into real anger. “You pretended to be someone else. And then you fucked me.”

“I don’t remember you complaining about any of that,” he ground out between gritted teeth.

“I am now,” she snarled back. Fury drove her. How dare he treat her like someone to be used? Blackmail was the perfect response for a man like him. The fire in her belly met her arousal in a battle to the death.

He splayed his hands over her breasts, pulling her nipples between his fingers as she rode him. The twin sensations joined the anger and desire in a rush of lightning inside her. Her orgasm rose sharply, without warning, and crashed through her, taking him with her.

He pulled her hips down on his as he came in a spasm.

She jumped off him almost before he’d finished and collapsed at his side. “Bastard,” she said between breaths.

“Bitch,” he replied with an audible, annoying grin.

T
hree hours after she’d screwed him—a very hot screwing, at that—he’d woken from a light sleep to see the snow had stopped falling. He rose up on one elbow and saw Abby was still asleep. She looked like an innocent angel. He scoffed silently at that.
Yeah, right.

He could just lie back down and go back to sleep. Clearly she wouldn’t know any different. It wasn’t his job to wake her so she could stop World War III—so
she
said. He lay back down, wrestling with his conscience. He wanted her out of his hair. No one made him admit he had a conscience, not without suffering the consequences.

He toyed with doing what he would usually. Fulfill the terms of his job and leave. He had indeed assured her safety—she’d proved amply that she could look after herself. But as she had said, he couldn’t prove that unless she blew her cover with her father. Although he was pretty sure that covert operators were allowed to read-in their parents or spouses if they wanted to.

For a second he wondered if Baston already knew what his daughter did. But if that was the case, he wouldn’t have wasted his resources making sure she was okay.
Bollocks.
He hated being against a rock and a hard dick. Hard
place
. Shit, his dick definitely was responding to her presence even if his mind was on her duplicity. Or maybe her little blackmailing soul was speaking to him. Maybe he liked being manipulated in such a blatant way.

He reached for her.

“You can stop right there.” Her voice startled him. He dropped his arm to the covers.

“I was just going to shake you awake. You’ve been snoring like a bear,” he said, swinging his legs out of bed.

She ignored his insult, such as it was. “You were supposed to wake me when it stopped snowing,” she said, also climbing out of bed and seemingly not caring a whit that she was totally naked.

He sat still, taking in the sight. Her nipples puckering in the frigid air, her tight muscles moving in glorious efficiency. “It was your watch. Technically you should have woken me.”

“Ass.”

“Don’t you forget it, love.” He stood and got dressed, having dug out his Under Armour thermals from the kit bag he’d brought.

She poked her head around the bathroom door. “What? Don’t forget what?”

“That I’m an ass. You’ve blackmailed me into helping you, and someone as well trained as you knows that isn’t a recipe for success.” He finished tying his laces.

She shrugged. “I trust you.”

“You shouldn’t. I have a healthy regard for self-preservation and even I don’t know what I’ll do if you get in the way of that. So you’re much better off not trusting me for anything. Just a friendly PSA.” He knew he sounded like a dick, but he just couldn’t help himself.

“I’m not worried. If you piss me off, or if you’re in the way of
my
self-preservation”—she punctuated with air quotes—“or my mission, I won’t hesitate to shoot you.” She disappeared again.

“There’s one problem with that, love. I’ve got your gun.”

She didn’t reply, but he heard the unmistakable sound of a shotgun being charged. “Fair enough,” he said, trying not to smile at her resourcefulness. “What else have you got in there?”

“Hairspray,” she said.

“Awesome.” She was such a smart-arse. His sister would love her. He made a mental note that no matter what, they would never, ever meet. Ever.

She came out of the bathroom as if she’d come through a
Tomb Raider
portal. She wore a white snowsuit that matched his, a white knife strapped to her thigh, a white holster holding a white handgun under her shoulder, and a white shotgun on a white strap over her back.

“I’m sorry. The CIA gave you all that gear but couldn’t give you a sat phone that worked? What the fuck?” Jesus. This was why he was in the private sector now. One too many times he’d been put in a sketchy situation without the right equipment. That didn’t happen anymore.

She shrugged. “I guess they thought snow was more likely than the need to use an emergency phone?” She frowned, though, as if she was only just now considering that herself. “Are you ready to head out?”

He sighed, as if he was still being brought along against his will. “I suppose so.” The future was a big blank book, and although he didn’t mind traipsing along on her dubious “mission,” he didn’t like the arm-long list of unknown variables. He’d never before undertaken anything without knowing roughly what he was getting himself into. But this? Could be anything from random muggers coming back for revenge to getting cold, wet feet to World War III. Take your pick.

They used the stairs to exit her apartment building. The street was silent and dark. The power still hadn’t come on, and the moon was so low it offered no light for the town. “Walk in the middle of the road as far as you can,” he said, tugging on her suit.

“Why?” She pulled her arm away from him.

“Because there are more hazards on the pavement than there are in the road. Curbs, manholes, rubbish, dog shit.” He grinned at her.

“You mean the sidewalk, I guess,” she said tightly.

He sighed. “Really? You couldn’t have made that intuitive leap in your own head?”

“I make it a habit to correct foreigners. It’s the only way they learn.” She walked a little faster. “I mean, don’t you know the Queen’s English?”

“Of course I do. She lives in Windsor. Haven’t seen her passport, though, so I guess she could technically still be German, but I suspect we would have heard about it by now.”

“What?” She sounded annoyed that he hadn’t risen to her Queen’s English comment.

“I know the Queen’s English. She’s the Queen of England—of course she’s English.”

“Oh, fuck off.” She stomped ahead.

“I’m trying to. You just won’t let me.” He didn’t know why getting a rise out of her made him so satisfied, but it really did. He barely even noticed the cold.

They made their way out of town. It was 3:00 a.m., and they hadn’t yet seen anyone. Not even a flickering candle in the window. The air was frigid, and the only movement ahead of them was their breath crystallizing in the air.

She was almost paralyzed with the idea that she was going to get them both killed. Not that she minded a whole lot about getting Malone killed—he’d be lucky if she didn’t do that herself—but if they died before finding out if Russia was actually invading Ukraine, she would have failed in her only mission. She wasn’t prepared to do that, but her confidence in her decision to go marching across what might as well be the tundra in the middle of the night waned with every step they took into the frigid night.

Malone matched her footstep for footstep. She wondered if he’d have gone voluntarily with her if she hadn’t essentially threatened his job. She’d never know now. And based on what little she knew about him, she could guess at the answer.

He said something she didn’t hear. “What?” she said, not breaking stride.

“I wanted to go somewhere warm,” he said.

She was about to dismiss his complaint as being whiny, when he continued.

“I already got frostbite in a cave in Afghanistan. I thought my freezing-my-nuts-off days were over. But then came you. Or rather, your father. And here I am. Makes me wish I hadn’t met him. You know, I don’t know much about the CIA, but I’m fairly sure that if you call them, you can get someone here to help you. It really doesn’t need to be me. It never needs to be me. For the past six months I’ve been getting caught up in American messes. Why can’t you guys ever do anything the easy way?” His voice had lowered, which made it sound as if he were a grumbly old mad muttering to himself.

She grinned. “For someone who claims not to know a whole lot, you certainly have a lot of opinions,” she said. She wanted to roll her eyes at him, but she was worried in this temperature that they might stay rolled—giving credence to her second stepmother, who’d warned her that her eyes would stay that way.

He stayed silent, and suddenly she didn’t want silence between them. It felt intimate, laden with unsaid things.

“I could have called someone for help. But no one would come on the basis of an alert on a pressure sensor that may or may not just be beeping to have its battery changed. I’ve changed some of them, but not all. If I call for help and it’s nothing, I’ll probably be reassigned to Greenland for the rest of my career. They didn’t recruit me to scream for help at the first hurdle. They recruited me to handle shit like this.” She watched her words leave her mouth as vapor, and then disappear. If only her words really ceased to exist after a few seconds. If only a lot of things did.

“You were recruited? You didn’t apply?” he asked.

“Right out of high school. I did one semester of college while they went through the recruiting process and then went straight to the Farm.” She’d been the youngest there by far, and that had isolated her. She couldn’t go to the on-site bar, couldn’t hang out with them outside class, and therefore had made few friends. A lot of them had been in government service for years in the military, police, or FBI. She’d been a kid. One they’d been suspicious of. One they’d condescend to at every opportunity. Suffice to say, she hadn’t kept in contact with them when she’d graduated. The same uncertainty that she’d felt all through the Farm, she felt now. And she hated that.

“You must have been a real swot to be recruited from school,” he said.

She bristled. “What do you mean, a swot?”

He hesitated. “A nerd? Someone who works all the time. It’s English, love. You should try learning it.” She heard his grin again, the one she was longing to smack from his face sometime soon.

“What about you? How did you end up in the SAS?” she asked baldly. If he wanted her to chat about her secret world, he’d better be willing to reciprocate.

“I was a squaddie right out of school. Just turned eighteen—”

“Squaddie?” she said. Her words were more difficult to push out with the exertion of wading through snow on an incline.

“An enlisted kid. The most expendable in the army. They send us in first in large numbers, and if you returned alive, you might get promoted.” He didn’t seem to be breathing as hard as she was, and that pissed her off.

“Go on.” She tried to slow down a bit, to level off her exertion. She didn’t want to be too tired when they got to the border.

He slowed down to keep pace with her. “I kept coming back. My ranking officer asked me if I’d considered joining the Regiment.” He gave a short laugh. “That’s kind of like asking a boy if he’d ever thought about being Superman. We all did. But none of us ever expected to actually do it. Back then, people regularly died just training for the opportunity to try out.”

“And you were prepared to die just to find out if you were eligible to join?” She’d have been frowning if her face hadn’t been immobile. You didn’t need Botox in the winters here, that was for sure.

He didn’t say anything for a minute, and when she looked at him he just shrugged. “I can’t say I thought too much about it. When you’re called to serve, you don’t ask too many questions, do you.”

Fair enough. “I didn’t. I just accepted that if they wanted me, then I should join.”

“So we’re not too different.” That grin again.

 She stopped in her tracks, about to point out in no uncertain terms that they were so dissimilar that she couldn’t even begin to list the ways, but he grabbed her and pulled her forward. “Don’t stop. It’s harder to stop and start. Keep going. You’ll just have to be outraged on the move.”

Damn him. He was even predicting her comebacks now. She tucked her head down and carried on walking. She wasn’t going to dignify his comments with a reply. She wondered if she should try to use the satellite phone now that they were out of the city. But she still didn’t have anything to tell them. When they figured out what was up with the sensor, she’d call.
When
I
figure it out,
she corrected herself.

“Can you feel that?” he asked.

A wind kicked up, first a breeze and then a rush of air so cold that her face—the only part of her that was open to the elements—throbbed with pain. And the wind meant snow. Another blizzard.

She turned to him and shouted into the wind, “We can’t be too far from the orphanage. Let’s speed up, try to get there before…” She didn’t bother to finish her sentence, because large, wet blobs of snow were already blowing in their faces. “Shit.”

“Just keep moving. Whatever happens, don’t stop, okay?”

She nodded. In a few minutes even if they had spoken to each other, they wouldn’t have heard a word. The wind blew the falling snow in their faces and the snow on the ground at their legs. What had she been thinking to embark on this stupid mission?

They walked for about an hour. At least that’s what she thought. It could have been ten minutes; it could have been two hours. They had to be close to the orphanage. If they needed to, they’d hole up in the barn and wait for the blizzard to pass.

As she made that plan, the wind and snow stopped as if someone had flipped a switch.

“Watch out!” Malone’s yell made her turn, but not before she felt the snow give way beneath one of her feet. He grabbed her and yanked her toward him, but his momentum forced him in the opposite direction and into the very crevasse he’d pulled her away from. As soon as she saw him fall, she knew it was the bank of a stream that ran alongside the road. At least it wasn’t deep. She heard a splash, though. That wasn’t good.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

He grunted as he pulled himself out. “Nothing a cocktail on a beach won’t cure.”

“Jesus, Garrett. Do you take anything seriously?” She stomped her feet to keep them warm.

“Not if I can help it,” he said. “Come on.”

Maybe he wasn’t too wet. “The orphanage isn’t too far. I wasn’t going to go there, but maybe now…”

“I’m fine. Let’s get this dog and pony show done so I can go back to civilization.”

“Sure.”

In the moonlight, she could see the outline of the orphanage and the barns and outbuildings that comprised the small farm. But she saw movement. “What’s going on there?” She pointed.