Nadia finds her shirt and pulls it over her head. Her hair is tangled from my hands. Lips swollen from kissing. Face flushed. Neck marked where I sucked too hard. There’s no hiding what we were doing.
She knows it too. I see the panic flash across her face, see her trying to smooth her hair down and failing.
Another knock. Harder. “Last chance before I breach this door.”
I cross to it. Try to breathe normally. Fail. Try to think of something to say that will make this less catastrophic.
Also fail.
This is not the first impression I wanted to make. Not disheveled and half-dressed with his operative’s juices all over me and my cock still straining against my pants and every sign of what we were doing written across both of us.
But there’s no alternative. No excuse. No way to rewind five minutes and make different choices.
I open the door.
Viktor Parlance stands in the hallway. Mid-fifties. Face as sharp as a hawk’s. He takes in everything in one sweeping glance. My disheveled appearance. Nadia behind me in a similar state. The small room with its single bed and the tension that saturates the air.
His expression doesn’t change. Just goes colder. Calculating. Weighing what he’s seeing against what he knows and arriving at obvious conclusions.
His gaze shifts from me to Nadia and back. Lingering on her swollen lips. Her flushed cheeks. The marks on her throat. The shirt she’s wearing that clearly isn’t hers.
Three seconds of silence that feel like hours.
Then his jaw tightens fractionally. The only visible sign of his reaction.
“We’ll discuss this.” His voice could freeze water. “Move. Now.”
I meet his eyes. Say nothing. There’s nothing to say that won’t make this worse.
His expression tells me exactly what he thinks of me, of this situation, of my chances at gaining Aurora’s trust after what he’s just walked in on.
Great.
This is a fuck-up.
Chapter 16
Nadia
“Move. Now.” Viktor’s voice cuts through the ringing in my ears. I follow him out of the motel room on legs that don’t feel entirely steady. Jericho walks beside me.
We don’t look at each other.
Can’t.
Because if I look at him, I’ll see what Viktor saw: hair disheveled from my hands, his shirt half tucked, the evidence of what we were seconds away from doing before reality intruded with brutal timing.
“We… uh… didn’t expect you so soon,” I stutter.
“Clearly not.” Viktor glances at me. “Storm front dissipated. You’d said it was urgent, so we pulled in.” He pauses. “Was it? Urgent?”
“Of course!” I blurt, wishing I could find my composure. “If you’d been a few minutes earlier, you’d have intercepted a Syndicate team.”
And maybe stopped me from making the worst decision of my life.
“We did,” he says briskly. “They spotted us on the outskirts of town. Saw the chopper and figured we’d be carrying higher firepower. They got out before we touched down.”
“That’s… that’s good, great,” I respond stupidly. “You don’t know how close we came to getting caught.”
