“Good girl!” Christian clapped his hands and plucked his coat from the hall tree on the way to the door.
Andthatwas how, two minutes later, Emily found herself walking down a quiet Folkestone street while all of England was on the hunt for her friend and coworker.
Life as a supersecret agent was weird indeed. People expected that it was all gas, no brakes. But the truth of the matter was that between bouts of chasing down the bad guys and running for their lives, there were long stretches of the everyday. Laundry. Bills. A walk to the pub for fish and chips because, you know,a girl needs to eat!
She contemplated the surrealism of it all as a light drizzle began to fall.
Gotta love England, she thought again. Chancing a glance at Christian, she admitted the man had more jawline than any mortal should.Gotta love Englishmen too, she silently added.
Chapter 22
Chelsea watched Dagan tape the ends of a fresh length of gauze around her arm. He had cleaned, medicated, and redressed the wound. All very carefully. All very precisely. All veryslowly. And it wasn’t an exaggeration to say the entire procedure had wreaked havoc on her respiratory system.
She was dizzy. The room spun around and around. In the center of all that tumult? Him. Z.Dagan.
Who knew being close to a man could actually make you hyperventilate?
He stepped back, eyeing his work, and managed to look both rakish—it was that damp curl of hair over his brow—and ridiculously pleased with himself. “Well?” he asked. “What do you think?”
She gave the fresh bandage only the most cursory of glances. She was too busy watching his eyes in the low glow of the glass pendant light above the sink.
Dear Lord,whydid you have to go and make him so irresistible?
“It’s good,” she allowed with a dip of her chin, pulling the sleeve of her sweatshirt down. “Thank you for taking care of it. For taking care of me. You tend to do that, don’t you?”
He smiled at her. Oh, how he smiled at her! It felt like the most beautiful gift, but also like a slap in the face. If he ever found out about the Big Bad Secret, he might never smile at her again.
“If you thinkthat’sgood”—he waggled his eyebrows—“you should see my moves in the boudoir.”
In the last handful of hours, their chemistry had managed to bust down the walls he had built around himself. He was still as formidable and bullheaded as ever, but now there was a side of flippancy and playfulness too. Basically, he was back to acting like the man she had met all those years ago when she was a wet-behind-the-ears CIA recruit.
It wasthatside of him, the irreverent side, that she had desperately missed. The side that had disappeared after Afghanistan.
Afghanistan…
The thought made her ache as if her bones were covered in bruises.
Fearing he might see, she adjusted her glasses and donned her best reproachful look. “First of all, I don’t cotton to cocky men.”
“Sure you do.” He winked.
“Second of all, we’ve been over this.” She clung to the decree she’d made inside the catamaran’s hold like she clung to the memory of her father and the responsibility she had to her mother.
“True.” He rubbed a hand over his beard—the Beard—and his callused palm rasped against the hairs. The sound had warmth coalescing in her core. Then he made it so much worse when he suddenly stepped between her legs and placed his wide-palmed hands on her waist.
She had dutifully sat on the kitchen counter while he tended her wound, and she had yet to jump down.Oh, why didn’t I jump down?It would have been so much easier to avoid his advances if she had been flat on her feet so she could…what? Run?
Thatwould have been really mature.
Dagan pulled her to the edge of the counter. Not gently. But not hard, either. Just…authoritatively. A man in charge.
Weak-willed ninny that she was, she experienced a rush of pleasure. That pleasure only increased when he pressed against her and she discovered he was hard. And pulsing.
Oh my!Dagan Zoelner in full-on seduction mode rated an F5 on the Fujita scale for nipple-tightening, panty-slicking, knee-loosening damage.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, Chels.”
She didn’t know what the heckfire he was okaying. “Okay what?”
