“I have a question.” Leo’s deep voice sounded rough, like boulders crunching beneath the tracks of a tank.
A question? Well, all right, a question was good. Better than him yelling at her to get the hell off his front porch. “What’s that?”
“Do the other three Horsemen of the Apocalypse know you’ve arrived safely on earth?”
“Ha-ha.” She blew out a breath, frowning up at him. Way up.Hashealwaysbeenthistall?“Very funny. But I’m serious, Leo.”
“So am I, Olivia. Christ, what will you think to do next? Provide Pakistani warlords with long-range missiles tipped with nuclear warheads?” The way he thrust out his chin highlighted the scar there, the one that marred the perfection of his short-cropped beard. He had others, she knew. Scars. Like those on his knuckles and that big, puckered one on his arm.
Isthatonenew?She didn’t remember him having that back in Syria. And, yeah, maybe she was being whimsical, or maybe she was totally in over her head where he was concerned, but all those scars, all those reminders of a life lived on the edge, seemed to enhance rather than diminish his blatantly male appeal.
Sheesh, Mortier. You’re here for his help, not to ogle his abs.
Although, with him dressed in nothing more than low-slung swim trunks that emphasized the leanness of his waist and a tight, V-neck T-shirt that unapologetically delineated the bulging muscles of his chest and shoulders, ogling was pretty much a given. Still, she straightened her spine and did her best to push off her hormonal-woman hat so she could make room for her CIA-agent cap—which seemed to slip straight off her head anytime Leo was in the same room with her, the fickle, exasperating thing.
“Well,” she said, lips twisting, “let’s just say I won’t equip them with missiles and nuclear warheads unless I have a really,reallygood reason to.”
He glared at her, his jaw grinding so hard she fancied she could hear his teeth creak. “I half hope you’re kiddin’,” he growled in that delicious Southern accent of his. And,ohgoody.There was nothing sexier than Leo going all big and badass…Whoops.There went her CIA-agent cap again.Damnit!“Scratch that.” He shook his head. “It’s a whole hope, because if you’re not, then I—”
“Cool your jets, sailor,” she assured him. “Neither I nor The Company have any plans to start selling hardware to Pakistani warlords. Hopefully, we learned our lesson about that back in Afghanistan in the eighties.”
“But givin’ chemical weapons to the folks who brought down the Twin Towers is okay?” He made a rude sound of disbelief that, had she not been looking at him to see his lips vibrate, would have made her wonder which end of him it had come from.
Okeydokey. So this was not going at all as planned. She knew she needed to take a step back and start over. Perhaps change tactics from brash and demanding to demure and pleading. Unfortunately, stepping back wasn’t something she did well. And demure and pleading?Sh’yeaaah. As if. Especially since the look on his face—the one that clearly telegraphed his belief that somehow this was all her idea and all her fault—lit a match under the kindling of her temper. Okay, so asking for his helphadbeen her idea, but that’s as much as she was taking credit for.
“Yes, it’s okay,” she declared righteously, mirroring his stance and placing her hands on her hips. Bran dropped his arm from around her shoulders, backing away like perhapsshewas one of the deadly chemical weapons they were discussing. “Especially considering we did it to catch a much bigger and, so far, largely elusive fish that has been threatening our national security formonthsor, more likely,years. And taking into account that if wedidn’tdo something fast, then—”
“Whoa, whoa,” Bran cut in, patting the air in the universal signal for her to slow her roll. “Let’s all take a T.O. here. We can go inside, maybe take a load off, and—”
Ignoring the man, she continued to face off against Leo. “For the love of all that’s holy, Leo, you know as well as anyone that when it comes to espionage, sometimes the wrong methods elicit the right results. So why don’t you stop busting my balls and let me explain what happened and how you can help me?”
One corner of his mouth twitched before he reached up to pull his sunglasses down his nose. He slid a slow, considering look up the length of her body. “Balls, huh?” he murmured, all deep and throaty and, holy hell…chill-inducing. Her antagonism leached out of her like radioactive waste from a dirty bomb. “And here you had me convinced that all you were packin’ in your pants was a firearm.”
She disregarded the heat that skittered through her veins when his hazel eyes skimmed over her skin. “I was trying to make a point,” she said. “And since I’m working on a short clock here, I’d like to get to it.”
“You mean you’ve gotmoreinformation with which to blow our mindholes?” Wolf Roanhorse, who’d moved to stand beside Leo, lifted one dark eyebrow. Leo and all the SEALs of Alpha Platoon were warriors. But Wolf reallylookedlike one, like something out of an old spaghetti Western. Of course, he didn’t dress like one—he was wearing shorts and a frayed T-shirt—and he certainly didn’tsoundlike one when he continued, “Good God Almighty, woman, I don’t think I want to hear it.”
Yeah, well, in a perfect world, she wouldn’t want to hear it either. But theirs wasnota perfect world. Case in point: the missing chemical weapons. “Would it change your minds…er…mindholesabout listening to my story if I told you there was half a million dollars waiting for you at the end of the tale?”
* * *
7:54 a.m.…
Leo didn’t realize he’d unconsciously let his gaze drift down the length of Olivia’s body, noting the soft flare of her hips, the tiny turn of her ankles, and the graceful length of her unpolished toes revealed by her plastic dime-store flip-flops until his eyes returned to her face and he was waylaid by her flinty, tough-as-nails expression.
“Were you payinganyattention to what I just said?” she demanded, leaning against one of the kitchen’s old Formica countertops. They’d done as Bran suggested, retiring inside the house to stop Meat’s incessant barking and because Leo hoped more of his uncle’s hot, strong coffee would be enough to make even the most harebrained CIA scheme sound plausible. “Or were you too busy giving me dirty looks?”
Oh, he’d been giving her dirty looks, all right. But he suspected her definition of “dirty” and his definition of “dirty” were light-years apart. Although he reckoned it was better all around to let her go on believing his heated perusal of her body had been derisive rather than desirous.
“I heard you,” he assured her. “I heard you say you began suspectin’ there was a mole or group of moles inside the CIA after that catastrofuck in Syria. I heard you say you’ve spent almost a year and a half tryin’ to draw them out. I heard you say that somethin’ suggested to you they might have contacts in Cuba.”
“Notmighthave contacts in Cuba.Dohave contacts in Cuba,” she insisted. “As you well know, the photos taken of the prisoners from inside the detention center”—the ones that had been splashed across the news websites showing the prisoners shackled and chained, the ones that had outraged the international community—“were leaked to the press by a group of al-Qaeda extremists living and working in Cuba. But what you don’t know, whatnobodyknows is that those photos were proprietary to The Company. The only way those guys could’ve gotten their hands on the pictures is if someone inside the CIAgavethem the digital files.”
“Okay, fine,” Leo relented. “So, since you and your supervisor were convinced the double agent had connections in Castro-ville, you all decided to cook up this crazy, idiotic plot to plant a too-good-to-be-true bit of Intel in a Company memo with the hopes that said double agent would take the bait.” He glanced around the kitchen at his friends. “Is it just me,” he asked the SEALs, “or does this reek of a case of the Mondays?”
“What’sthatsupposed to mean?” Olivia demanded, looking around the room.
“There’s a saying the Teams like to use,” Mason explained, which surprised Leo since Mason lived by the motto, “A quiet man is a thinking man.” It was usually a miracle if they could get two sentences out of the guy. “It goes a little something like: You tell me our intelligence community is fuckin’ shit up, and I’ll tell you it’s Monday.” His quintessential South Boston accent made “our” sound more like “ah.”
