Those black eyes continued to burn into him.
Sinner shifted his shoulders to ease the tight pulling sensation between the blades. “What can I say? The suits didn’t fit.”
Steele’s brows shot higher, and Chickie mouthed, Suits?
Con turned to the woman. “Sinner will be your partner for this op.”
Her stare collided with Sinner’s again—dark, steady, impossible to read.
Too bad he’d already gathered intel on his new partner.
One bag. Thin file. Walls thicker than reinforced steel.
Even before the briefing ended, he felt the first rumble of thunder. The beginning of a storm.
And this time, he was standing right in its path.
* * * * *
One look around the room told Opal everything she needed to know about this operation.
Her ironclad grip on her control almost slipped when her lips twitched at the corner. She bit down on her bottom lip to stop her smile and turned her head to stare at one of the agents who brought her here. She knew their names, of course. But in her mind, she’d started calling them Starched Collar and Stiffer Collar.
She flicked her stare from Starched Collar to the guy they called Sinner.
If her cohorts were stuffy, by-the-book types, he was the exactoppositewith his bodybuilder physique and tight black T-shirt pulled so tight across his broad chest that it appeared thin in places. Not to mention the sharp angle of his jaw could be a weapon.
She made a derisive noise that always got on people’s nerves—a device she used to her advantage. “Hetrained at Quantico? You mean flunked out, most likely.”
His gaze landed on hers again, a heavy weight that she kept fighting the urge to look away from, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of breaking eye contact first.
He joked that the suits didn’t fit. Maybe he meant they literally didn’t fit—he was big and buff. The suits probablydidn’tfit.
He held her stare without blinking. She matched him, second for second. Intimidation was an art she’d mastered long ago.
Five beats turned into ten. “Do they even make a shirt with your neck size?”
One dark brow cocked upward.
Stiffer Collar cleared his throat, an embarrassed sound like tearing paper. “No one at Quantico scored higher.” He paused, directing his attention to Opal. “Until recently.”
Suddenly, realization struck Opal, and an image loomed in her mind’s eye of a brass plaque in the display case at Quantico. The name inscribed on it? Caius Sinclair.
Sinclair. And from that meeting, she learned his code name was Sinner.
Opal didn’t react to the unexpected. But when she realized she was sitting across from the man who she’d been silentlycompeting with her entire career, heat began to warm her cheeks.
No. No fucking way. She was never a blusher, and she wouldn’t start now. Especially in front ofhim.
She learned long ago never to reveal her feelings to anyone, ever. Doing so was the equivalent of handing them a bullet with her name etched into it as deep as Sinner’s name was on that plaque.
She fought the sensation, bundling it into a dark corner inside her mind where she stuffed all her feelings.
In reaction to the news that they didn’t know their teammate as well as they thought, murmurs ran through the rest of the special ops team. Sinner himself seemed to be a man of few words and had no response to any of it.
The heat in her cheeks thankfully trickled away, but that didn’t curb her awareness of Sinner’s unending stare. It gave her a chance to study him, though, and it didn’t surprise her that each time Starched Collar or Stiffer Collar spoke, a small crease winged out from the corner of Sinner’s left eye.
Maybe they had something in common after all. He didn’t respect Starched and Stiffer, and even though she worked for the FBI, she despised the Bureau.
