by Roze, Robyn
His cavalier dismissal angered her. “Like hell, I am.” She rose above him before his rebuttal could spill out. “Is my daughter safe?”
“Yes, of course she is.” His defensive tone echoed around them.
“Then my place is here.”
He pushed to his feet, towered above her, the coffee table wedged between them.
“Under the circumstances, Shayna, your place is wherever I say it is.”
Now her mirthless chuckle filled the gap between them, then her expression tightened with fierce resolve. “I don’t believe for a second I’m any safer halfway around the world than I am right here with you. And I am not going to lead anyone to my daughter. So, do whatever it is you need to do. With me here. Period.” Her shoulders locked in defiance.
She remembered the man Sean had morphed into more than a year ago that horrible night on board the Tuscan Dream. The man who had been devoid of emotion; who had barked orders the night her world hit rock bottom with the news of Danielle’s kidnapping. She could feel Sean’s struggle, now, to keep the same formidable man at bay.
“Goddammit, Shayna. Do not fight me on this.” His gritted words and commanding stance were meant to shut her down.
She held his pointed stare and folded her arms. His lids slammed shut at her stubborn posture, his hand dragging down his face as he turned and walked away to brood in front of the scene-stealing picture windows. He remained mute, motionless, like an imperial statue overseeing the glittering cityscape the setting sun had birthed in its wake, as if just for him.
“This has to do with your involvement in Mexico last year, doesn’t it?” She reached out, tentative, and touched his arm. Memories of breaking news stories, with destruction-filled images of the criminal cartel head Hector Morales’ devastated jungle compound, flashed in her mind. A shiver traveled along her spine as the unforgiving phantoms of their past crept from the shadows to squeeze around them, taunting and jabbing with barbed memories and scandalous secrets.
“I knew the risks,” he answered, unaffected, attention still cast somewhere beyond the city.
She zeroed in on his taut reflection in the pane and stepped closer.
“Like blood in the water, I knew the sharks would come. I’ve been waiting for them, planning.” His jaw ticked.
“Were you ever going to tell me? Or were you going to come up with some reason I needed to see Dani—without you?”
“Does it matter now?” he said, focus pinned on the looming moon.
“It does to me.”
Their eyes connected in the waves of the shimmering nightscape dotted across the window.
“Yes,” he said, eyes fastened to hers in the glass canvas. Without warning, he drew her against him, her face cupped between his warm hands. “I was going to tell you, soon. I wanted everything in place first before I did, before I sent you to see Danielle.”
His finger traced her cheek, slid across her lips, then teased along her throat to finger the vibrant, multicolored gemstones looped on the necklace he had surprised her with in Picinguaba, a beautiful, secluded fishing village nestled between Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The hint of a happy memory from that stay, the first and longest stop on their honeymoon, lifted the torment from his face.
Then remorse dropped the curtain.
His soulful eyes raised to hers, filled with penitence, his face lined with regret. “I would’ve done everything in my life differently if I’d met you earlier.”
Her hand skimmed his cheek. “But you didn’t. And I’m not going back to the past, Sean. What’s done is done. This is where we are right now.” She gripped his clean-shaven face. “You have to figure this out with me here. Because I’m not leaving.”
His bronzed features tensed with unease. “I’m used to going it alone. It’s safer that way.”
“It’s too late for safe.” She brushed her lips across his, and his arms circled tight around her. She pulled back as far as he would allow, her expression serious. “Tell me about the man I saw at the pool yesterday. Where is he now?”
With a sigh of resignation, he pressed his forehead to hers. “He’s safe. For now. And if he can be of use, he’ll stay that way.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think I can recruit him. We share a common enemy. He just didn’t know it until I opened his eyes.”
She considered his words for a moment. “This enemy you share is the one who sent him to follow us?”
He nodded. “You’ve always been safe, Shay. I would never put you in harm’s way.” His hand smoothed around her neck, fingers threading through her hair. “He was tracking and reporting, that’s all. But it’s going to heat up. That’s why I need you to leave. I’ll come for you when it’s over.”
She felt the coiled power in his body, the forceful beat of his heart, the urgency in his hands. “Will it ever really be over?” she asked, searching his face for imaginary answers, distracted, as her mind drifted from present dangers to past sins. His and hers.
His back stiffened from the blow of her loaded question, the reproach delicately laced throughout her whispered words. She had forgiven his past, accepted his flaws, and only asked him for one thing in return: the truth. She deserved it. And he had promised. But would the day come when the truth wasn’t enough?
Or perhaps too much.
He pulled her back to the present with a soft kiss that returned the tenderness to her eyes and body. “If I make my stand now, here, it’s as close to being over as I’ll ever get.”
The words stung, popped the deceptive bubble of normalcy they had been living inside. The desperate fantasy she wanted to believe. But Sean was no ordinary man. Had she expected a different answer? Perhaps she had hoped so, glossed over their reality. After all, she made her decision, eyes wide open, back in Italy, when she learned the man now standing tall before her, the man she had been grieving, was very much alive. She had made her bed that day, tainted her future, and carried heavy secrets that could destroy her, and her daughter.
Then the nagging doubts she had locked away since the death of her ex-husband, Frank—at Sean’s hands—broke free, releasing a weight from her chest while poking holes in her sinking heart. If Shayna understood anything, it was consequences. And she expected her bill to come due, her world to crash and burn around her. One day. Until then, she had vowed to herself to live each moment as if it were her last. Because even though her husband, who adored her like no other before him, had a dangerous past filled with violent acts she didn’t understand or condone, she could not walk away from him, then, or now. Consequences and conscience be damned. Wanting him, staying with him, felt no more a deliberate choice than the draw of her next breath.
This man made it easier for her to breathe, easier to live. Here and now.
Her chin dipped, following the taunting trail of her fingers as she undid one button after the other on his dress shirt. Then she spread the fabric wide, exposed his strength, and pressed her lips to his powerful chest, breathed in his scent, and savored the soft tickle of his dark chest hair against her skin. His breathing grew shallow, eyes dilated with arousal.
“I want to be here when you do, Sean. I’m not leaving and that’s final.” She shook her head when his mouth opened to speak, pressing a finger to his lips. “I will do what you say, follow your orders, here. I promise. I don’t want to get in the way, or cause problems. But I am staying.”
His lips thinned in worry. “You don’t understand what you’re saying, Shay.”
Her fingers teased under his shirt collar, inching the fabric across his broad shoulders and down his muscular arms before yanking it tight above his elbows. The flare of desire in his eyes flooded her body with craving.
“I’d rather face my fears than run from them.” Her palms glided along his taut abdomen, and snaked up over his chest, her appreciative sigh swirling with the ratcheting heat between them. “I’ve more than proven that throughout my life.” Her lips twi
sted in amusement. “Not to mention these past few months.”
Admiration lit his face, his fingers skimming her cheek in agreement before his lips collided with hers. The growl of his intent vibrated and teased against her lips.
Then he pulled back, emotion laid bare in his eyes. “Until my last breath, you will be the one thing I will never regret.” He tilted her head back, catching her eyes with his. “And the one thing I will never deserve.”
Chapter 3
“You’re shitting me, right?” Mick Torres said.
In response to the rhetorical question, Sean sat across from his old friend like a stone-cold statue.
Mick sank back into his seat under the shade of the aft deck on the Tuscan Dream, squinting behind his sunglasses from the blast of bright sunlight reflected off the sea. He puffed on his cigar, unable to process what he had just heard. And if Sean’s don’t-fuck-with-me attitude was any indication, it appeared he wasn’t about to offer any details.
Sean’s finger pounded with authority on the table. “I’ve never gotten us into anything I couldn’t get us out of.”
It was harder for Mick to read his friend of forty years when he could only see himself in Sean’s mirrored shades. However, he had known the man long enough to pick up the subtle cues: the tightness in his shoulders, the tick of his jaw, the tinge of hesitation in his voice.
“Her staying here changes everything,” Mick said. “Makes it harder for all of us.” He took a swig of whiskey and waited for a response.
“You think I don’t know that? You think I’m not already planning for it?” Sean said, the edge in his voice unmistakable.
“I’m sure you are. But why do you have to?” Mick’s meaty hand scrubbed over his recent buzz cut. His face furrowed in puzzlement, then the jagged scar that zigzagged at one corner of his mouth lifted in shocked comprehension. “Never thought I’d see the day a woman could puss—”
Sean cut him off. “If you want to keep your balls, don’t finish that sentence.”
Mick choked back a chuckle at the newfound knowledge. Scratching at the day-old stubble on his cheek, he turned his head to scan Sentosa Island and to hide the grin breaking across his face. He mumbled in disbelief.
“Got the balls to repeat that?” The flicker of amusement on Sean’s face contradicted the threatening tone.
Mick dismissed it with a shake of his head and grabbed his crotch. “I’m real fond of my boys.” He jabbed the stogie back between his teeth.
Sean chuckled. He had few true friends, men he could trust with his secrets, and his life. Mick Torres was at the top of that short list. Not only a brother-in-arms, but the brother he always wished he’d had. He was also Sean’s right-hand man in times like these, his equal in all ways. They had been through it all together, surviving the impossible more than once, and he hoped like hell they would make it out together again, one last time.
Mick had arrived a day earlier after calling in important markers and queuing partners. Allies they vetted and recruited together over the years in governments and media outlets, now briefed and ready to play their parts in the chain reaction that would bring down, until now, an untouchable, former US Senator. Graham Dixon was a brash, self-proclaimed military genius and decorated marine with his own PMC—private military corporation—cobbled together over the last two decades with mercenaries who operated without borders, rules, and most especially, without morals.
Of course, when it came to men and their wars, the moral landscape was a wavering sea of infinite shades of gray. Sean had learned the hard way that morality cuts like a double-edged sword, depending on which end of a bullet or bomb a man finds himself standing.
Sean had been young and reckless in his early twenties when the then senator Dixon first approached him, and then later recruited him with a high-pressured pitch about using his elite skills and black ops training to take out the global trash. The same charisma, hype, and military hero bravado that had duped the senator’s voters and PACs for five terms had also snared Sean. But the shocking day, nearly twenty years ago, when the vile truth of his employment revealed itself, the crushing moment he realized he had lost his soul, survival instincts engaged, and an exit plan emerged.
The how and why of his involvement with Graham Dixon didn’t matter, though. No tormented logic or twisted justification could clean his slate. No amount of good deeds could erase his sordid history with the man. There would be a special circle in hell for him, for the things he had done in service to the senator, unwittingly, or not.
With the harsh truth unshackling him, he had gone out on his own, disillusioned and determined to do things his way. Determined to make amends where he could, and to one day rid the world of Senator Graham Dixon, and others like him. With those goals at the forefront, he had recruited his own men, built his own teams, developed his own network, and sourced his own missions. Collateral damage was unacceptable to him. However, killing bad men had never cost him any sleep.
The memory of a stormy night on a cliff took him back to one of those bad men. The crack of thunder, the plunge of a knife, the shove off a cliff…Shayna would never approve of the judgment and sentence he meted out that night to her ex-husband. But she had forgiven him—or so she said.
Yet, the anguished dreams she had been having since docking in Singapore had caused his doubts to fester. She had said nothing to him about the dreams; he wasn’t even sure she remembered them. But she often awakened in the night agitated and short of breath, while he watched and listened next to her; her sleep disturbed, her conscience distraught.
Not his.
Even if she didn’t know what she had been dreaming about, he did. He knew who haunted her dreams: the ghost of the man he killed back on that cliff. A man who would always have a piece of her heart. No matter what the bastard had done to deserve losing it. Sean did not understand the remnants of that connection, not after everything that had happened; he never would. He only knew the tormented words she murmured in the deep of night had cut him like a knife.
Perhaps fittingly so.
“What would your pops do, Sean?” Mick lifted his chin, pushed out his lips, and blew lazy smoke rings.
He knew what his friend was asking. Sean mulled the question, his focus settling above Sentosa in the distance. The island playground quivered like a mirage on the calm waters where they had dropped anchor, away from shipping lanes, prying eyes, and possible listening devices.
With his mind stuck in a time long since gone, Sean answered without looking at Mick. “He’d keep her safe, above all else. Then he’d do whatever was necessary.” He was not all that different from his father.
They had both served as executioners to the men who had hurt their wives.
Decades back, Sean told Mick the story of what had happened to his mother before his father, a Navy man recruited to Special Forces, could bring his war bride home to the States at the end of the Second World War. How his father had made certain she was safely tucked away with his family before returning to Italy to hunt down, one by one, the animals who had broken her in his absence.
Mick finished his drink, squared the tumbler on the tabletop and gave it a quick spin as if to make a point. “That’s right. He would. I always liked your pops. He was the old man I never had.” Taking a final shallow draw, he tossed the cigar nub into his empty glass, then leaned across the table. “He’d tell you to get her the hell out of here. Then go do what you gotta do, so you can get back to her.” He paused, matching his shaded eyes with Sean’s. “But until then, she’s a dangerous distraction, brother. A liability. She puts this entire mission in jeopardy. And I know I don’t need to tell you what’s at stake.”
There was more at stake than Mick realized.
Sean gritted his teeth. He wasn’t about to sit here and discuss his marriage. How Shayna would view him flying her out of here to safety on par with him leaving her, again.
This was a no-win situation, not for the fi
rst time in his life, but he sure as hell wanted it to be the last. He wanted to be done with all of this, once and for all. No loose ends. Mick knew this. They had discussed it at length. In fact, they had been planning the current mission since their last one in the Mexican jungle that had killed Hector Morales and crippled his notorious international crime syndicate.
That nearly suicidal operation had forced a new timeline for the current mission. A mission for which he and Mick had been laying the groundwork, an insurance policy of sorts, for over a decade. It was complicated and deep, with powerful men who would stop at nothing to protect themselves. At least he understood that about them, if little else.
When he left Dixon’s shadowy organization all those years ago, he had known then that this day would come. He had been patient, meticulous in laying the foundation, and then placing the metaphorical charges. The blast radius from which would be too widespread to sweep under the rug with spin, well-planted media, and high-priced PR campaigns.
Now, above all else, Sean was ready to be something he had never been before: satisfied.
Satisfied with simple pleasures. A sunny day. A full belly. Clothes on his back. A stubborn, gorgeous wife. A woman who knew the worst parts of him and loved him, anyway.
The goal line was in view.
He reached down and pulled out the latest find from Mick’s coolerdor—a homemade humidor, positioned between them on the deck floor. He shook his head with a knowing laugh. No man loved a full-bodied cigar, or a full-bodied woman, more than Mick Torres. The guy always managed to find a new roll of tobacco with some tie-in, no matter how lame, with whatever mission they were on.
Sean maintained his poker face while reading the label. But it was difficult, considering how well Mick had hit the target this time. “Man O’ War Ruination.” Sean’s shoulders quaked in laughter and appreciation. “How in the hell do you find these?” He waved the stogie at his friend.
The big man reclined in his seat, arms and ankles crossed, with a shit-eating grin anchoring his jaw. “Internet.” He pointed at the spicy stick with its thick, juicy Habano wrapper. “I’m gonna get us some badass Spartan helmets too, just like on the label.” He slid the cutter across the table to Sean.