“I don’t mind.” He cut her off before she could finish.
“Wow.” She gaped at him. “Underneath all that plastic surgery and all those aliases and that super-secret spy stuff you really are just a guy, aren’t you?”
He stepped in to her, letting her feel how much of a guy he truly was because he was. She sucked in a ragged breath. Her knees threatened to forget their function and let her slide onto the forest floor in a hot pile of need.
“I am a guy, Sonya, in every sense of the word.” His ragged voice had gone guttural.
Had he kissed her, she would have let him take her right then and there. Right up against a tree or down in the damp dirt and leaves. She would have let him have her any way he wanted, and she would have loved every minute of it. But he didn’t kiss her. Instead, he stepped away.
Without the support of his big body, she felt bereft. Like a part of her had fused to him and he’d taken it with him when he retreated.
Dare she hope the little tick in his jaw meant he felt the same? Dare she hope—
He opened his mouth and popped his jaw. The warmth in her blood competed with the cold chill of distant memories. Looking at him now, standing so straight and tall, watching her with the kind of hunger that liquefied her bones, she would almost swear she was looking at a ghost.
“Come.” He tugged her on a snaking path through the dense trees and undergrowth.
She tried to unscramble the thoughts in her head, the feelings of familiarity that competed with her uneasiness that mixed with her lust that rubbed elbows with her misgivings. Jamin “Angel” Agassi was the definition of the phrase riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
So why did she feel like she knew him?
Chapter 18
“You are uncharacteristically quiet,” Angel said after they’d hiked for a while, avoiding fallen logs and the places where the ground dipped and held puddles of water.
The gentle buzz of insects drowned out the sound of the distant highway. The pungent, tobacco scent of wet leaves mixed with the more fecund aroma of fertile soil and brought to Sonya’s mind the time Mark had picked her up in a rented car and driven her outside Paris’s city limits to a secluded little patch of heaven. Next to a cool, clear stream, he’d taken his time undressing her, and after a mind-numbingly sensual skinny dip, he’d made slow, passionate love to her under a weeping willow. She remembered how the water on her skin had turned to sweat, how her body had heated in the dappled sunlight and under the unparalleled intensity of Mark’s desire.
“What are you thinking about?” Angel asked.
She could have beaten around the bush, she supposed. But beating around the bush felt too much like lying, and now that she was no longer undercover, she was finished with deceit. “The past,” she told him. “Being around you makes a lot of old memories rise to the surface.”
He glanced at her, his eyes fierce enough to strip the stripes off a tiger. Would she ever get used to that piercing gaze? Would she ever not feel exposed when he looked at her? “Are they good memories?” he asked.
“In some ways, yes. In some ways, no.”
“Why no?”
“Because no matter how sweet they are, they’re still only memories. All I have left of a lost love and broken dreams.”
He was quiet for a while, the only sound that of their shoes scuffling through the damp leaves. Finally he asked, “If your lost love were here right now, what would you do? What would you say to him?”
The thought had her heart aching. “You mean after I tackle-hugged him, kissed him until he was cross-eyed, and then beat him repeatedly about the head and shoulders for being stupid enough to agree to that awful bomber’s invitation to meet up?”
She realized Angel didn’t know what she was talking about when he lifted a black eyebrow. She didn’t explain herself. Instead she said, “I guess I’d ask him what heaven is like. Because if there’s such a place, then that’s where he’s been. He was good and true. Strong and brave. No one deserves eternal happiness more than Mark.”
She realized she’d said his name aloud when Angel made a noise of surprise.
“I’ve told you everything else; I might as well tell you that too.” She shrugged helplessly. “His name was Mark Risa.” She peeked over at Angel, figuring if she was in for a penny, she might as well go in for a pound. “He worked for the Mossad like you. But unlike you, he was Israeli. We met in Paris. He was there chasing a synagogue bomber. Did you…” She had to clear her throat. “Did you ever meet him? Mark, I mean?”
Angel searched her eyes, a question she couldn’t fathom shining in his. Eventually, he shook his head.
She smiled sadly. “I guess that would’ve been too much to hope for. That you knew him.” She sighed. “You would’ve liked him, I think. Like I said, you two are a lot alike.”
“We are Mossad.”
The way he said it made it seem as if that explained everything. And maybe it did. Maybe everything else—the way he moved and popped his jaw, the way he looked at her—maybe all that was simply coincidence.
