“More,” she begged. “You, Sean. More.”
More.
The simple word stopped him cold.
Over the course of his adult life, Sean had given women his body. A few had received his loyalty and even fewer—namely, one—had been gifted with his chameleon’s ability to blend into the lines that separated truth and good from lies and betrayals.
But Brynn wanted more.
“More,” she repeated.
“More,” he promised.
He stripped off his clothes, grabbed her hips and lifted her so he could press his erection into the depths of her hot, needful sex. She cried out, begging again for “more, more, more.”
He started to move. He held her tight and dropped his defenses, focusing only on giving her what she asked for.
More
.
Two
Something shifted. Something turned.
The minute Sean tore off his clothes, the vibrations in the air crackled from a fire of pure lust into an inferno that burned straight through Brynn’s skin, muscle, sinew and bone.
She could not breathe. She could not speak. She barely had the power to cry out in ecstasy when Sean slid inside her. Her body, hijacked by need, rejected any further input from her brain.
She dragged herself up onto all fours. She wanted this. Only this—sex so elemental that the whole of her genetic makeup sparked to life. She curved her body to accommodate him. He braced his hands on her hips, clutching her, holding her steady as he drove into her, each stroke harder and faster, each connection bonded, then severed, then bonded again until she was his.
Then the madness hit her. Like a smack against her flesh, the sensation sent her into a vortex of pleasure. He paused, but she rocked harder, demanding every last drop of what he had to give.
Abandon.
Freedom.
Release.
Half of her body collapsed back into the pillows while the other half remained under his control. He eased out of her, worshipping the roundness of her backside one last time before he snatched the sheets from the floor and floated them over her.
She wanted to speak, but she had no words.
As if he knew, he made a long, shushing noise. “Don’t move. I’ve got you.”
She couldn’t stop shaking, not even after he went into the bathroom, doused a washcloth with warm water and returned to the bed. He made slow, steady work of cleaning her up, forbidding her from resisting with whispered orders that took the sting out of her sudden, physical helplessness.
“Now sleep,” he instructed.
She whined in protest, but he turned her over and silenced her with a kiss. Shamelessly, her body reacted, yearning for more of what she’d already had.
With Sean, she could never get enough.
“Hot damn,
cher
,” he murmured as she writhed against him. “When you say
more
, you’re not kidding.”
She could waste her time wallowing in embarrassment over her insatiable desire, or she could brace her hands on his shoulders and push him down until his mouth was on her breast. She opted for the latter. He did not resist but instead threw himself into satisfying her wants, sucking and licking and kissing until she was lost entirely in the sensations only he could invoke.
According to Sean, he was a mercenary—a man whose loyalty shifted as needed. Maybe he was, but for now, he was hers. Her needs were simple and evident, and he read them like a blind man read Braille. His mouth and hands and tongue and fingers were everywhere, then nowhere, then centered in the spot where she needed him most. She coiled her hands into his hair like iron springs, stroking his scalp and tugging at the strands until her orgasm built up, burst and settled into a constant, low-frequency hum like white noise.
As her quivering subsided, Sean slid beside her and cradled her close. He tangled his hands into hers and tucked them softly against her belly.
“Now…sleep,” he ordered.
She no longer had any choice. He’d overloaded her nervous system and zapped her reserves of strength. Oblivion was seconds away when he tugged her close and whispered something against her hair—a murmured promise she couldn’t process but still understood.
He’d never forget her.
Of course he wouldn’t. How could he when she had no intention of ever leaving him behind?
* * *
“I know you.”
Of all the phrases Brynn had
not
wanted to hear after she slipped out of their hotel room to retrieve their dinner order from the lobby,
I know you
topped the list.
The speaker, the unshaven, garlic-scented man whose only job had been to deliver their food, narrowed his red-rimmed eyes and gave her a once-over. His intense scrutiny tumbled through her like a series of earthquakes.
Not that this was unusual. She hadn’t stopped trembling since she’d woken up.
The night had slipped away. Sean had let her sleep well past dinnertime, so she’d insisted on being the one to go downstairs to collect their late-night food delivery while he took a shower. Luckily, this was Spain, where eating dinner close to midnight was a point of national pride.
Not so luckily, the guy who worked as the restaurant’s gofer seemed convinced that he’d seen her before.
“Excuse me?” she said, rolling out her best German accent.
Sean might be the former CIA agent, but Brynn was no slouch in subterfuge. She hadn’t expected to be recognized, not when her last trip to this Basque tourist spot had been nearly two years ago.
Luckily, she always had a fallback plan. Like falling hard for the man she was supposed to protect. Or, more immediately, having a random guy who stank of booze exclaim that he’d seen her before.
A switch in accent usually threw people off, but this guy’s crooked-tooth grin peaked through his overgrown facial hair with an air of stubborn familiarity.
“Aye, you, I’ve seen before. I rarely forget a redhead, lass. It’s against my upbringing.”
The faint Irish accent he’d used to greet her transformed into full-on brogue. She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. The lady tourists who swarmed this quaint, coastal town probably tipped bigger when they heard him shift into his best Colin Farrell.
Brynn just wanted to blend in long enough to collect her food. “Oh, have you been to Berlin?”
Despite her outstretched hand, he held tightly to the sack, concentrating all his energy into coming up with an answer.
Thinking, for this guy, looked painful.
“Haven’t left this beach paradise for over ten years. Came here for a vacation with my wife and never left. She took off so long ago I hardly remember her. But you,
you
I’ve seen before.”
Brynn turned down the wattage of her grin and glanced around her. The lobby of the hotel was empty except for a young desk clerk who was engrossed in the screen of his smartphone.
Brynn tucked away her ring-less left hand. “This is my first time in
Spanien
. Honeymoon.”
The delivery guy’s saucy grin retreated beneath his mass of beard. His gaze darted for any sign of a husband who might not appreciate him flirting with his new bride.
Brynn used his momentary distraction to snatch away the food.
His eyes, muddy blue and rimmed by tired lids, shot back to her. He examined her face with entirely too much interest, spawning a prickly field of gooseflesh at the nape of her neck.
Was he really just an overly friendly delivery guy? Or had he been sent to do reconnaissance for whomever had chased Brynn and Sean out of the safe house?
“How much do I owe?” she asked.
Time to end this tête-à-tête. The less time he had to place her, the better.
He rattled off the amount. His expression changed from suspicious to pleased once she handed him a stack of euros and he calculated how much cash she’d turned over with a sultry, “
Stimmt so
.”
Clearly, he was familiar with the German phrase for “keep the change.” He counted through the euros a second time, bumping his shoulder on the doorjamb on his way out. She gave him one last grin when he looked back but then focused on the sack of food until he disappeared.
Once he was gone, she rushed upstairs, containing her speed only to avoid grabbing the attention of the disinterested clerk or any guests who might be wandering the halls. Once on their floor, she sprinted, threw open the door, shoved herself through and locked it behind her. Without hesitation, she burst into the tiny bathroom where Sean was wrapping a towel around his waist.
She spoke through a suddenly dry mouth. “We’ve got to go.”
She dumped the food on the table by the door and tore open the drawer she’d used to tuck away their dirty traveling clothes. She could have cared less about the jeans and T-shirts, but they’d need the jackets. Sunny Spain wasn’t so warm in winter, and France would be even colder.
“What happened?” he asked calmly.
She stuffed their clothes into a laundry bag. They’d dump them at the first opportunity. They needed to leave no trace.
“Get dressed.” She pulled a clean shirt and jeans from the go-bag beside the door and tossed them to him.
He dropped his towel and obeyed, but not without scowling. “Tell me what happened.”
“I think I might have been ‘made’ by the delivery guy.”
Sean winced as he jabbed his damp legs into his jeans, but by the time he wrapped his strong hands around her upper arms to force her to hold still, his command of his body had returned.
Guilt jabbed through her panic. He wasn’t one hundred percent healed. She’d just put him through some very rough-and-tumble sex, and now she was ordering him to speed up because of a hunch that some random guy might have identified her?
Luckily, Sean wasn’t so easily spooked.
“Slow down,” he ordered. “Tell me what happened.”
Unlike the shaking she’d experienced since their lovemaking, this persistent quake settled the moment Sean touched her. He had a quelling effect on her. Yes, he made her nervous. Yes, he made her hot. But no man to date, not even her father, had ever made her feel so safe.
“The man from the restaurant. He said he knew me.”
Sean’s eyes darkened. “Did you recognize him?”
Brynn concentrated, mentally stripping away the man’s beard and focusing on the shape of his nose, the color of his eyes and the distinctive sound of his voice. For nearly her entire adult life, she’d worked the European division of Titan International. She’d heard more lilts, brogues and accents than a coffee vendor at Heathrow. But she had a very good memory for faces, and nothing about that guy was the least bit familiar.
“I don’t think so. But he could have been a plant. Someone could have sent him into the hotel.”
“Or he’s just a guy who thought you looked familiar.”
She cursed. “I should have dyed my hair. Hell, I should have cut it. Instead, I got laid. Some secret agent I’m turning out to be.”
“We discussed this,” Sean said, his voice steady. “We had only a brief window to change your look, and we opted to get
el Creador
working on a new passport rather than take the time to put together a disguise. We made a choice.”
“Maybe it was the wrong choice,” Brynn said.
Sean eyed the door, his hands sliding from her arms to her wrists. “It does seem like a weird coincidence that some guy would claim to know you when we’re on the run.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences, do you?”
He shook his head. “Two months ago, someone took me off an American street and sent me to England to be tortured for information that I don’t have. Then someone else, we don’t know who, arranged for you to come to my rescue. Now, in a town where you have a high-value contact who can get us the papers we need to slip into France and figure out what’s really going on, you get recognized on your first trip out of the room? No, I don’t believe in coincidences.”
Brynn continued packing, but she no longer felt like her internal organs needed to pop out of her skin in order to operate. “We need to get out of San Sebastían now. We can use another contact for papers or try to cross the border illegally.”
“Or we can sniff around first and see if maybe we’re jumping the gun.”
His voice was even, but his gaze darted to the door. “No one has had time to track us down. We’ve been here less than a day.”
“We could have been followed,” she insisted.
“We weren’t,” he argued. “I’m not an amateur, Brynn, and neither are you. On the deserted roads we took, we would have seen evidence of a tail.”
“They could use cyber tactics.”
Sean continued to dress, putting on shoes, toweling his hair dry and slicking it back before he checked his ammunition and gun and then shrugged into his jacket.
“Your laptop has advanced security protocols, and our phones are untraceable. We stole a car at random and ditched it on the outskirts of town. We took public transportation to get to your friend, the forger, so unless he gave us up, no one has had time to find us. You can’t deny the possibility that you’re being paranoid.”
“Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get me,” she countered, quoting a covert operations adage that might have shifted from wisdom to cliché but that wasn’t any less true. “What if they tracked us via satellite imaging?”
The corner of his mouth quirked into a grin. “You’ve been watching too many spy movies.”
“My father’s life was a spy movie. And I’ve been working on the fringe of your industry for years. I’m not naïve. I know what capabilities are out there.”
“Then you also know that most of those capabilities are available only if someone pays a shitload of money or works through reams of red tape to get satellite time that can’t be tracked by any other world agency that might be watching skyward. We’re not worth that kind of trouble.”
“Maybe Jayda is.”
“Jayda is dead.”
Every time Sean repeated that claim, an arctic chill sliced up Brynn’s spine. She knew that he believed his former lover was no longer alive, but had he convinced himself because he trusted the veracity of the information, or could he not accept that the woman he’d risked everything for was somehow still alive, responsible for his pain?
Brynn could think of a million reasons why a high-level assassin might abandon a man who loved her, but the idea of Brynn ever doing that to Sean caused an ache in her stomach that nearly doubled her over. They’d been lovers for less than a week, and already, Brynn had risked her life and her career to help him find the answers he needed.