Dirty Dare: The Rescue (Sexy Suspense) (Part 1, spin-off to the Dirty and Dare Me series) (8 page)

“You’re going to wear me out so I can’t walk. Then you’re going to take off so that I can’t follow you.”

“Mmm,” he said, wiping the shiny gloss off his lips before he kissed her neck. “That would be downright dastardly of me.”

“Are you saying you could never be so shameless?”

He chuckled. “Of course I could, but that’s not what I’m planning. In fact, it’s the opposite.”

“You’re not going to try and escape?”

“No, I’m cutting out tonight. I’ve just decided that I need to take you with me.”

He gave her no chance to respond but instead kissed her with the kind of single-minded intensity she’d come to crave from him—the kind that belied the fact that although they’d pleasured each other in nearly every way possible, they were virtual strangers. Yes, she’d told him about her childhood in boarding schools, and he’d recalled several hilarious tales of his misspent youth in the New Orleans French Quarter. Yes, they’d exchanged stories that covered topics ranging from the worst sex they’d ever had, the best meal they’d ever indulged in and their preferred method of ending relationships that had run their course, but they’d kept away from topics that linked them as a pair.

Intimacies aside, the nature of their relationship had not changed. She was still the woman who’d saved him. He was still the man she had to keep safe and away from the trouble that had nearly gotten him killed.

She grasped his cheeks, holding him close before she reluctantly broke the kiss.

“I can’t betray Dante,” she confessed.

His sky blue eyes darkened as if invaded by storm clouds. “But you can betray me?”

She pressed her mouth to his again, her mind swirling, her senses enthralled by the man in her bed.

Now she understood what he’d intended when he’d given in to her seduction plan so easily—he was making her care about him, forging a loyalty that would supersede whatever debt she owed to Dante Burke.

And damn it, his strategy was working.

“I only want to keep you safe,” she said, grateful that he didn’t pull away but instead relaxed into the mattress and curled his arms around her.

“This isn’t keeping me safe, Brynn. This is keeping me out of the way. And while I was on death’s door, it was a solid arrangement. But I’m stronger now, as I’ve been proving for the past forty-eight hours. I need to find out who took me—and why.”

Brynn snuggled up his chest so that her chin rested on his sternum. “What did they ask you?”

Up until now, Sean had remained reticent whenever she questioned him about his kidnapping. But if he was counting on her cooperation, then he had to come clean.

“They wanted to know where Jayda was,” he replied.

“Jayda?”

“Jayda Hei, or at least, that’s the name she went by when I knew her. She was a North Korean assassin when I met her, but by the time we parted ways, she’d moved to the allies, in a way, as an agent for T-45.”

Brynn sat up. Another layer of complications descended over her, causing her to drag the still-damp blanket around her body while her stomach quaked then dropped.

“She was T-45?”

“It’s a secret organi—”

“I know what it is,” she interrupted. “My father was a founding member.”

She’d never told anyone that. She’d never had the need. Before her holiday of healing with her twin, even she and Ian rarely broached the topic.

But Brynn wasn’t a fool. The web connecting her to Sean’s kidnapping just got tighter and intricately more treacherous than she’d thought.

“Your father couldn’t have been old enough,” he replied.

“He was sixteen in the last year of World War II,” she explained. “But he was highly intelligent and perpetually in trouble, according to his stories. Apparently, he always looked younger than he really was. During the war, he made an effective little spy. Who would suspect a gangly, wide-eyed schoolboy of passing information for the Crown?”

Sean plumped the pillows behind him, signaling that his interest in her family’s history wasn’t just for show. When he snagged the corner of her blanket and reeled her in close, she couldn’t resist surrendering to his warmth and relishing in his arms wrapped so possessively around her.

“So your family has a long history in espionage,” he concluded.

She chuckled, though the sound lacked the proud humor that her brother might have felt. Ian relished the storied saga that connected the Blake name to the most devious minds in European history, but Brynn’s pride in her father’s accomplishments was always balanced against the knowledge that his undercover connections had gotten her mother killed.

“You could say that,” she admitted. “T-45 started after the Allies won the war and there were a lot of European spies with no way to feed their adrenaline addictions. They were too impatient to wait for their governments to rebuild and used to working on the fly, so they formed their own organization and offered their services to whichever president, king or prime minister could come with up cold, hard cash.”

“How long was your father an operative?”

“Until MI-5 and SIS came calling when he was nearly thirty, I think. He had a strong sense of loyalty, so he signed up and worked for Great Britain until he met my mother.” This time, her laugh was genuine. “After she died, I found her diary. God, I must have read it a thousand times as a teenager. She was a proper Boston young lady attending a soirée with her family-approved banker fiancé, and my father was a painfully handsome ‘diplomat’ with a British accent, irresistibly twinkling blue eyes and a gun tucked beneath his tuxedo.”

Sean grinned. “He was packing?”

Brynn couldn’t help but conjure an image of her father from the pages of a photo album, back when he’d been young and cocky and the embodiment of a young James Bond rather than the haunted, jaded, crueler version of a brokenhearted man he’d become before his death.

“Even when I was only fourteen, I couldn’t help but wonder how she’d spotted his weapon when he undoubtedly possessed the skills to keep it hidden.”

“Unless he wanted her to see it,” Sean suggested, his eyes sparkling with the same mischievous glint she suspected her father had used to snare her mother.

Buggers, but it was powerful stuff.

“I wouldn’t put it past him,” she confessed, turning her attention to the smattering of chest hair tickling her cheek. “He was an international man of mystery, and she was, after all, just a young woman fresh out of finishing school with a degree in art history and no particular plan to use it for anything except to sit on the board of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.”

As she spoke, Sean stroked her hair, combing his fingers through the damp strands with a lazy rhythm that made her believe, for a split second, that they had all the time in the world to enjoy each other.

But no one had all the time in the world. No one knew when the end would come, even a retired spy who’d made the mistake of trying to leave his past behind him.

“So he was older than she was?” Sean asked.

“And that was definitely part of the appeal. She was twenty-three, naïve, romantic and desperate for adventure, which he offered with his concealed Walther pistol and devilish grin. She fell instantly in love. Nothing was going to keep her from winning him for herself.”

Brynn had never imagined feeling that kind of love. She’d never even thought she wanted it. Nestled against Sean’s chest, however, she considered the possibility. Her every breath came with an infusion of his scent. He was intoxicating, and for the first time in her life, she understood how her mother had fallen so quickly under her debonair father’s spell.

Clearly, it was a genetic weakness.

“And just like you would have,” Sean mused, “she got exactly what she wanted.”

Brynn hummed her agreement. “For a little while, at least.”

Sean crooked his thumb beneath her chin and forced her to meet his gaze. “Sometimes, a little while is the best two people can hope for.”

“Are you talking about us now?”

“Yes.”

Brynn pushed up, kissed him softly and then sat against the cushions beside him. The conversation had somehow gone entirely off the rails, though she suspected Sean had artfully turned the tracks while she was thinking about her parents and the past.

But she’d told him enough. He now knew more about her than any lover who’d come before him—and probably, more than any who would come once he was gone.

“So this Jayda Hei,” she said with a snap, making it clear that her turn of personal share-time was over. “She was your lover?”

Sean cleared his throat, but to his credit, he answered. “Not at first. She was young when we met. I wasn’t much older. I’d been recruited out of Special Forces into the CIA and had been quickly assigned to the Arm. Anyway, her family in China had sold her to a recruiter from North Korea when she was two. Maybe three. By the time she turned sixteen, she was one of their most effective assassins, taking down targets and disappearing before anyone thought to look at the sweet young girl in the Hello Kitty t-shirt. A few years later, she got traded to T-45. Then, seven years ago, she snuck into the States and went off the grid. She was considered a threat to national security, so the Arm was ordered to retrieve her.”

“You mean you were called in?”

“Yeah,” he admitted, combing his fingers through his long hair, tugging hard on the strands.

Brynn smiled. Under any other circumstance, she doubted he’d display such an obvious tic, but this topic had him on edge.

“And you found her?”

He nodded. “Eventually. Before it was too late, at any rate.”

When his eyes met hers, a hard edge sharpened his expression into one she hadn’t seen before. Fear skittered up her spine, reminding her of all he’d endured—and hinting at what he’d dished out when he’d been on the other side. Sean Devlin might have become her gentle, giving lover in the microcosm of this villa, but in the outside world, he was a dangerous man.

“Okay, wait,” she said, backtracking. “You were sent to find her. Why’d she go off-grid?”

“She was intercepted by a terrorist sleeper cell,” he answered, his voice absent of emotion of any kind. “They’d lured her there, thinking she’d be easy to break and turn to their cause. They wanted her to take out an important American asset, but we never found out who the target was. They hadn’t gotten that far when I found her. I freed her, but then she didn’t want to go back to T-45. She wanted to defect.”

Brynn wasn’t intimately familiar with the CIA playbook, but she was pretty certain that taking on a rogue agent after she’d been exposed to potential brainwashing could not have been a popular prospect.

“Your superiors wanted her?”

Judging by the set of his jaw, the answer was clear.

“I talked them into it. Or technically, Dante did. She trusted me, so I was assigned as her handler. Unfortunately, I took that title a bit too literally.”

Brynn scrunched the blanket around her. Jealousy iced through her veins, and she hated it. But her unreasonable emotions had no place here.

Sean was not hers to protect or possess. He was only hers until he finally made good on his promise to escape.

“So the people who took you are looking for Jayda. They thought you could lead them to her. Can you?”

His gaze froze on hers. “She’s dead.”

“You’re sure?”

He looked away, again dragging his fingers through the hair he’d refused to let her trim. “Until a month ago, I was. Now? I don’t know. That’s why I need to get out of here, and I need you to help me. If Jayda is still alive, she’s in danger. I need to find her before the thugs who grabbed me do. Before the Arm or T-45.”

“What if those thugs are the Arm or T-45?” she posited.

He reached across the mattress and took her hands in his. When he tugged her back into his space, it wasn’t to kiss her or hold her or remind her of the intimacies they’d shared. He needed her help. To save another woman. A woman he’d probably loved.

“That’s why I can’t go this alone. I want to, but I’m not at one hundred percent, and by the time I’m totally recovered, it could be too late. Will you help me? Will you defy Dante and maybe even put your life at risk? For me?”

Ten

For one long, tortured moment, Sean thought Brynn would either beg him to reconsider his escape plan or flat out refuse to help. She did neither. She jumped out of bed, threw on a robe and disappeared downstairs without uttering a single word.

He didn’t have the strength to follow her.

Physically, he was depleted. And emotionally?

Damn.

For as long as Sean could remember, he’d never factored his feelings into the decisions he made. He wasn’t heartless. He acknowledged that he had emotions. He regularly tapped into them for the juice to drive him toward getting what he wanted. His ambition, determination and focus were born from his need to love, protect and, sometimes, avenge.

But he never indulged in his feelings. Pity parties were for suckers. He was a soldier. He pushed forward and moved on before crap like anger, hate, fear had a chance to fuck with his mind or throw him off course.

That’s how he’d gotten through finding out what a bastard his father was. That’s how he’d dealt with his mother’s perpetual optimism and how he’d survived loving Jayda, even after she’d disappeared. Hell,
especially
after she’d disappeared. His ability to disconnect his brain from his heart had gotten him through tough times.

Now, as his broken bones, torn ligaments and rendered flesh knitted back together, so had the conduit that connected his brain to his heart. He cared whether or not Brynn trusted him—and he had no idea why.

Maybe it was because she’d saved him. Maybe it was because she worried about how he’d react to her involvement, whatever it was, in his half brother’s death. She was smart, beautiful, sexy. And if Dante trusted her, she was trustworthy. But would she swing to Sean’s side while his old spymaster friend held something powerful over her head?

The overload of questions and sex eventually knocked him out. When he woke up, the sun was setting, and Brynn was sitting at his bedside, a small, electronic disc cradled in her palm.