Did that make Jayda the fool, or Brynn?
Pushing her own conflicted feelings aside, Brynn focused on one inalienable fact—Jayda was the reason Sean had been tortured. Jayda was the reason why Sean, a giving, caring lover, would leave Brynn in a heartbeat if he thought it would further his cause.
Dead or alive, this phantom from Sean’s past was haunting him—haunting them. Could Brynn exorcise Jayda’s memory from Sean’s brain and win them a shot at a real relationship? Did she want to?
“I think we should leave,” Brynn suggested. “As a precaution.”
“Not until we get what we came for.”
“There’s another forger down the coast,” she assured him. “He’s not quite as reliable, but maybe that will work in our favor.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” Sean said. “Not yet. It’s one thing to be watched at a safe house where we’ve stayed put for six weeks, but it’s something else to be tracked across the Spanish countryside in less than twenty-four hours. You’re spooked. I get it. And maybe your gut is dead-on. Still, I should take a look around before we go flying into the night. Agreed?”
No, Brynn didn’t agree. But if she’d learned one thing about Sean, it was that no matter how conciliatory he pretended to be, her approval wasn’t needed.
She wasn’t even sure if he needed
her
anymore…and that scared her worst of all.
Three
“Take this,” she said, offering him her weapon.
Apparently, when calm, cool, collected Brynn Blake got spooked, she lost her head a little. As former covert ops, he should have considered her nerves as a dangerous threat to the mission. But he hadn’t been an agent for years. Distance and time gave him the perspective to see her fear for what it really was.
She cared.
About him—more than she cared about herself.
This was not good.
“I’ve got my own piece,” he reminded her, though as she’d been the one who’d unlocked the gun safe at the house in Barcelona and had invited him to pick his poison, he wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t already know.
She shook her head, snatching the proffered handgun to her chest. “I’m out of my element here, Sean. Why did Dante think I could do this? Protect you on my own.”
“It wasn’t Dante,” Sean reminded her.
“Fine! Why did anyone think I could do this?”
Sean tamped down a grin, knowing she wouldn’t appreciate his seeing humor in her moment of frustration. Brynn was accomplished at covert ops, and up until this moment, she’d reacted as any seasoned agent would.
But she wasn’t a seasoned agent, adequately and honestly prepped on the full scope and risks of the operation. She was a woman who’d been misled, lied to and swept up in a sexual relationship that she’d initiated not because of mutual attraction, trust or respect but as a means to an end.
She’d pushed herself, professionally and personally, to the limits. It did not surprise him that cracks were starting to form—cracks he might not be able to seal with standard reassurances. Sean was keenly aware of how far out of her comfort zone Brynn had come.
He wasn’t far behind.
Sean took her firearm, but instead of concealing it, he closed the distance between them. He grabbed her hand. She gasped but did not pull away.
With slow sensuality, he widened her clenched fingers, one by one, easing the hard steel against her palm. He pressed the gun firmly against her skin, giving her no choice but to adjust her grip until she’d regained the power the weapon promised.
He watched her eyes. With a sharp sizzle, the fear ignited by the deliveryman’s claim fizzled as if Sean had licked his fingers and pressed the wet pads on a wick.
“Got it?”
She nodded.
Her chin was set. Her lips curved into a self-deprecating grin.
“Stay put,” he ordered.
He dimmed the lights, took a long glance out of the third-story window then kissed her softly on the cheek and disappeared out the door.
* * *
In less than ten minutes, he’d returned.
In less than ten minutes, Brynn realized that at some point over the past six weeks, she’d fallen into a deep, dark pit of emotion, as unfamiliar and terrifying as any hole in the ground. Sean mattered to her. The thought of him getting hurt again tore at her core, not because she’d been ordered to protect him but because he’d become a part of her life.
This could not be good.
“I didn’t see anything suspicious,” he said, locking the door behind him and grabbing the food she’d abandoned earlier. Gingerly, he extracted a pint of colorful gazpacho that had spilled some of its garlicky deliciousness into the paper tote.
Fresh off his solo adventure, he looked invigorated and re-energized, wholly unaware of what was going on in the madness of her heart.
“You checked the—”
He quelled her questions with a level glare. “
Cher
, I’ve been doing recon since you were in finishing school. If anyone is watching this place now, I’d have noticed.”
She pushed herself out of the freshly dug emotional well. Now wasn’t the time to acknowledge her feelings, much less deal with them. Not when they might be on the brink of a crisis.
“They don’t need to watch us anymore,” she said. “If that man worked for the people chasing us, then they already know we’re here.”
“And if he was just an overly friendly delivery guy angling for a bigger tip, you’ve worried for nothing. Our best bet is to stick to our original plan. We’ll take turns by the window and sleep in shifts. But for right now, we’ll eat. I’m starved.”
Sean removed a lamp from on top of a small antique table and then scooted it closer to the bed so one of them could sit on the mattress. He was right. She could be overreacting—on both personal and professional levels. She resolved to take the first shift by the window, but Sean redirected her onto the bed then shoved a container of soup and a spoon into her hands.
“Eat,” he said. “Then you can grab a shower and maybe a couple more hours of sleep. I’m too pumped.”
As he unwrapped and dished out their dinner as if she hadn’t just acted like a newbie agent on her first mission, he filled the silence with a story about a stakeout he’d been on in Bangladesh where he’d had nothing but unfamiliar foods to keep him from starving. Though she attempted to laugh in all the right places, she could not have repeated a single word of what he’d said.
She’d freaked out. She’d overreacted to what she could now see was probably a case of overzealous flirting, not highly skilled subterfuge. She’d put Sean at risk simply because she’d been focused on the threat of failure rather than on taking the necessary steps toward success.
“Stop it,” Sean said.
Brynn popped instantly out of the deprivation chamber she’d erected out of her own self-loathing.
She snatched the carton of cold Spanish soup from across the table. “Stop what?”
“Beating yourself up,” he replied.
“Now you read minds?”
“Don’t have to. I know the look. I’ve seen it often enough in a mirror. So you might have jumped the gun earlier, but you might not have. Your instincts told you something was wrong, and extra precautions are not a bad thing, particularly when it would be so easy for us to fall back into this bed and forget about anything and everything that brought us here in the first place.”
Brynn scooped through the soup, only vaguely aware of the bright mix of colors and textures. “Too easy.”
“If you still want to leave—”
“No,” she said, shaking her head while she stirred the soup, the spicy aroma settling her nerves and reinvigorating her hunger. “We’ve got a good setup here. We’ll be gone by morning. It’s just been a while since I’ve taken to the field without a backup team of highly trained agents who rely on me for their paycheck.”
Sean’s grin, which lit straight to his blue-gray eyes, caused a flutter in her stomach.
“You can write me a check if it’ll make you feel better,” he said. “But I require several forms of ID. You know how people are these day about false papers.”
Brynn laughed, resisted the childish urge to fling food at him for his cheekiness and instead smiled her way through dinner. They both needed a serious infusion of calories, so in addition to the cold vegetable soup, they feasted on a carton of buttery shrimp and octopus, a mound of saffron-infused rice and a delectable roasted pork that they ate with their fingers.
And though they both made weak claims about being stuffed, they battled with spoons for four bites each of flan.
By the time she’d rolled into the bathroom for a shower, Brynn’s lungs ached from laughing. With Sean’s help, she’d shaken off her nerves and had spent an hour eating and joking, barely aware of the six times Sean had gotten up to look out the window or the two times he’d stuck his head into the hallway to investigate suspicious sounds.
She’d been undercover before—in this town and countless others across the continent—and she’d never had so much fun. She’d always been in charge, the key contact in operations that somehow were always make-or-break for her reputation, her company and her career. This mission wasn’t any different. In fact, rescuing Sean and spiriting him away to the house she’d inherited and had kept secret from the world had been the most dangerous she’d ever accepted.
And yet, somehow, once Sean had banished her fear, she found it nearly impossible to latch onto it again.
She turned the shower to scalding and stepped under the spray. Little by little, other emotions seeped into and out of her pores with the steam. When she lifted her face into the water, eyes closed, images flashed in her brain—images that she’d successfully locked away until now.
Sean, slumped in the metal chair, his body a broken kaleidoscope of color.
Yellow and green. Old bruises.
Blue and purple. Darker. Fresher.
And red. God, there had been so much red. In every shade from pale pink to vibrant scarlet and shades of crusty brown that had not only possessed a hue but a stench.
He’d been beaten and cut—nearly flayed open.
Alive, but only just.
Brynn forced her eyes open. She gasped, coughing as the water from the shower sliced down her throat. Never in her darkest nightmares had she seen such cold cruelty. She never even watched violent films. It was a natural defense for a woman whose mother had died after being beaten and buried alive.
Shaking away the memories, Brynn grabbed a tube of shampoo and concentrated on working her hair into a thick, even lather. She counted the circles she drew on her scalp. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. With each rotation, she inhaled and exhaled, forcing away the imagined images of her mother’s body, forbidding them from merging into her memories of Sean’s ordeal.
Every day during his recovery, he’d hit another milestone. With every victory, she’d celebrated by erasing a bloody picture from her brain. By the time they’d made love by the pool, she’d pushed aside the vivid details of what he’d been through. He’d been so strong. So vital. The task had been easy.
Now, the gory truth came rushing back. Why?
She threw back the shower curtain, determined to deal with this emotional upheaval. Frazzled nerves and uncertainty had caused her to overreact with the deliveryman. She couldn’t risk falling apart again. Not when they were so close to crossing the border and finding the truth.
“Sean?”
She ducked back under the water, made sure she’d removed the last of the lather. When she was done, she said his name again, wondering if he hadn’t heard her before.
He did not come.
Her chest tightened, but she forced herself to remain calm. She grabbed a towel, wrapped her hair then did the same to her body. She opened the door, expected to catch him by the window, so lost in thought that he hadn’t heard her call.
One glance told her the gut-punching truth.
He was gone.
Four
The stink of rotting fish guts, burnt grease and overripe produce burned the insides of Sean’s nostrils. After so many weeks of fighting pain with every breath, smelly gulps of air were just as welcome as sea breezes and perfumed skin.
Though now that he’d been hiding amid the refuse for nearly an hour, he would have paid a king’s ransom for one more whiff of Brynn.
His gaze flicked out of the shadows, away from the restaurant’s kitchen door. Ten buildings down and three stories up, Brynn was safe in their room. By now, she’d read his note and respected his carefully worded request that she trust him and stay put until he returned.
After she’d gone into the shower, his restlessness had won over his confidence that his first sweep of the area had been enough. He’d grabbed his gun and slipped away to take a second look around the hotel, determined to return before Brynn came out of the shower.
Once he’d reached the lobby, however, he’d opted for a quick trip to the restaurant where they’d ordered their meal. He wanted to see the creep who’d freaked Brynn out for himself.
One look at the guy had convinced him to stick around.
Sean may have not known Brynn for long, but he’d learned enough to trust that if the delivery guy from the restaurant had set off her spidey senses and his initial recon had turned up nothing, then he needed to take a second look. If that meant standing in sludge and breathing in toxic fumes while rats climbed across the toes of his shoes, then so be it.
If nothing else, it kept him from the close quarters of the hotel room. Thinking about her stripped naked in the shower, he’d become wound as tight as a switchblade. With the slightest touch, he’d strike. They would have made love again, losing themselves in erotic madness, forgetting the potential dangers that lurked nearby.
They’d done it once.
They’d do it again.
And despite the risk, he still couldn’t help calculating how, if he left the dank alley in the next ten minutes, the stench from the restaurant’s garbage might not have permanently leeched onto him. When he returned, he could climb into bed where he fantasized Brynn might be, slide his hand between her legs or suckle the spot beneath her ear that seemed to be her “on” button so they could make love until morning.
He could feast on her sweet flesh as the sun rose or maybe meet the dawn with her lips wrapped around his cock.