Chelsea’s fatherhadbeen a romantic. A man filled with a hunger for life and the belief that love really did conquer all. He had proved that belief by falling head over heels for Chelsea’s mother during a time when white Southern boys were not supposed to marry poor black girls. And then he’d reinforced that belief every day for twenty-three years, through thick and thin, whether dealing with prejudice or acceptance. And always with a smile on his face and a wide-open heart—until one day that heart gave out on him and he died peacefully in his sleep lying next to the woman he had loved since the moment he saw her at a drive-in movie.
Being compared to him had always been a compliment. But now, sitting behind Dagan, still dazed by the power of his kiss and wounded by his horrified expression afterward, Chelsea wondered if being a romantic, if living with her heart wide open, would cause her to suffer more hurt than she could handle.
She was pragmatic enough to know that her parents had been incredibly lucky, and not everyone ended up with happily ever after.
Whoa. Had she really just gone there? Imagined a future with Dagan?
She closed her eyes, unconsciously squeezed his waist tighter, and admitted that she had. Which was ridiculous because…number one, the look on his face after the kiss did not bode well for a lifetime of repeats. And number two, there could never be any sort of forever for them because she was harboring the Big Bad Secret.
Oh, good night, nurse! Get out of your own head, Chels! It was just one little kiss in the middle of a tense, adrenaline-filled situation. It meant nothing to him!
Right. Good advice. Trouble was, no matter how much she tried to convince herself otherwise, it had meant something toher.
Chapter 9
Dagan had been calling himself an idiot for the last hour. But as he turned down the road leading to the Dover docks, he decided that was an insult to stupid people.
His reaction to the feel of Chelsea pressed against him, the warm weight of her amazing breasts on his back, the sultry heat at the junction of her thighs, not to mention the sheer delight of having her small arms wrapped around his waist, went beyond idiotic and veered helter-skelter toward insanity.
We’re talking straitjackets, padded walls, and gurneys with straps attached, folks.Because even though his rational mind knew that a woman like her wouldn’t want anything to do with the likes of him, and that he had already strayedwayover the line with that kiss, that didn’t stop his irrational mind—the base, instinctual, animalistic part of his brain—from wanting her.
He had been hard the whole ride, and the subtle vibration of the Ducati’s well-made engine hadn’t helped his situation one bit. It was agony times one hundred. And he was terrified her hand might slip down. If it did, there was no way she wouldn’t notice the effect she had on him. Then he would have somethingelseto apologize for, in addition to that ill-timed, ill-advised, all-consuming kiss.
A parade of images marched through his head: Chelsea seated at the conference table back in Chicago, admitting to having a monkey on her back and fearlessly volunteering for the job to infiltrate Spider’s household; Chelsea bent over her laptop, poring over Intel, her fierce mind hard at work; Chelsea sitting in that chair in Roper fuckin’ Morrison’s office, tied and helpless and willing to give her life for the cause.
Chelsea…
Jesus H, he was going to have to grovel for her forgiveness. Then again, perhaps grovel was too sanitized a word. What he needed to do was to get down on bended knee, kiss her feet, and beg her to absolve him for taking advantage of the situation, for taking advantage ofher.
The trouble with that plan? Well, once he began kissing her feet, he would be tempted to continue the journey upward. Nipping her delicate ankles. Biting her lithe, muscled calves. Licking her smooth thighs until—
Oh, for God’s sake!
“Look how pretty!” Chelsea yelled over the Ducati’s engine, pointing at the towering cliffs of Dover when they finally came into full view.
The cliffs were composed almost entirely of chalk, a bright, blinding white. Dagan couldn’t shake the feeling that they were angry teeth, snarling across the Channel at continental Europe and daring anyone with ill intent to set foot on the island. But it charmed him that after all Chelsea had been through in the last couple of hours—hell, what she’d been through in the lastmonthunder the employ of Roper fuckin’ Morrison—she could still look at those bleached cliff faces with a sense of childlike awe.
“Don’t you think that’s just about the prettiest thing ever?” she enthused, her breath warm against the nape of his neck, sending a cascade of chills down his spine.
Instead of answering—afraid she would hear the lust in his voice—he simply nodded and followed the others into the gravel parking lot beside the docks. One by one, he and his teammates cut the bikes’ engines. The sound of low, growling horsepower was replaced by theshushof waves lapping against rocks, theclink-clinkof mooring lines against rigging, and the forlorn cries of the seagulls that dove and darted overhead.
Having grown up in Cleveland, on the banks of Lake Erie, and then having worked the last handful of years in Chicago, perched alongside Lake Michigan, Dagan thought there was just something about the water. He loved the fishy smell of it. The devastating…vastness of it.
Those rare times when he’d had a day off and had gone sailing with friends, he’d realized that he could only truly grasp his smallness, his infinitesimal worth in the grand scheme of the universe, when he was out in the middle of all that unrelenting water. And for some reason, that made him feel better. Made all his mistakes seem somehow less important, less grave, just…less.
“Emily Scott! As I live and breathe!” A big-chested man who looked like he should be playing cornerback for the Chicago Bears trotted across the lot toward them.
“Rusty!” Emily hopped from the back of Christian’s rented motorcycle, tossed Christian her helmet, and turned to throw herself into the arms of the approaching man.
When she kissed the newcomer smack on the lips, Dagan was sure he heard Christian growl. He glanced over, brow raised, but was immediately distracted when Chelsea hopped off the back of the bike, taking all her feminine warmth and softness with her.
He felt the desertion like a physical ache. His bodylongedfor the touch of hers.
Then he wasn’t feeling anything but annoyance when she blinked at Emily’s friend in wide-eyed wonder and muttered, “Goodness sakes. That man is a specimen.” Now it washisturn to growl. “I swear. I feel like I’m in some sort of sexy man laboratory. Each new experiment is hotter than the last,” she added.
Dagan didn’t register that, in fact, Chelsea had just called him sexy. He was too preoccupied by the latter half of her statement. The part where she thought New Guy was hot.
A sense of possessiveness he had absolutely no business feeling spread through him.
