The Reveal

by Julie Leto

  DIRTY DARE

  Part Two: THE REVEAL

  A sexy suspense spin-off of Dare Me & the Dirty Series

  by

  JULIE LETO

  Praise for the “DIRTY DARE, PART ONE: THE RESCUE”

  “I’m already counting down the days until the next installment in this series.!”

  — Liza Brown

  Blogging by Liza

  “A quickly paced spy story where the action is broken only by the hot sex scenes.”

  — k.c. quinn “kquinn”

  Amazon Top 1000 Reviewer

  “I’m a big critic of the new trend in serial writing, BUT Dirty Dare and Julie Leto have converted me. I can’t wait to find out what Sean and Brynn have in store for me next!”

  — Christina

  Nice Ladies, Naughty Books

  Main Menu

  Start Reading

  Afterword

  Other Works by Julie Leto

  About the Author

  Contact Information

  Copyright

  Table of Contents

  Mission Update

  Target Asset: Sean Devlin

  Dossier (Abstract): Special Forces, CIA (Arm division). Dismissed after failure in reprogramming of NK/T-45 asset. Current job: Private Investigator, New Orleans

  Supervising Agent: Dante Burke

  Current Status: Liberated from undetermined captors at Birmingham, England. Suffered extensive injuries. Recovered at unsanctioned safe house.

  Suspected Associate: Brynn Blake, CEO of Titan International (see Confidential Subcontractor File #010198ARK). Prior agency contact limited to international operations.

  Connection to Target Asset: Unknown

  Current Location: Unknown

  One

  With languid, careful slowness, Sean Devlin popped the buttons on Brynn Blake’s blouse and peeled aside the silky material. With his fingers, he mapped the smooth skin beginning at her cheek then explored down her throat and over the soft curve of her breasts.

  He did not close his eyes. He’d seen every inch of her from a hundred different angles, but each new unveiling was a revelation—a lesson he needed to learn.

  Knowledge was power.

  In the growing darkness of their small hotel room in the Spanish coastal town of San Sebastían, he saw her again as if for the first time. He slid his fingers through her rich, red hair. He smoothed his thumbs over the shadows forming beneath her electric green eyes. His energy, rebounding after a couple of hours of sleep, zinged with each subtle blush of her ivory skin. When Sean had first seen Brynn, his swollen eyes and battered brain had mistaken her for someone else.

  But she was nothing like that other woman. Jayda Hai had shredded his life down to a superficial condition where survival had been his only reward. Brynn Blake, on the other hand, had devoted the past six weeks of her life to building him back up. He was grateful. He was surprised. But mostly, he was stubbornly wary of what would happen next between them.

  Beyond the sex. That, he knew, was inevitable.

  From the moment she’d secreted him away to a safe house in Barcelona, he’d studied her. He’d watched her as continuously as his uncertain consciousness had allowed, determined to learn her habits so he could figure out how to escape her “protection.” But the stronger he got, the less he’d cared about breaking free—and the more he’d simply wanted to break through.

  Even under his constant scrutiny, Brynn was not an easy woman to know. Shrewd and controlled, she’d cleverly chosen seduction as her means of keeping him under her thumb. Sean had played along, knowing a well-satisfied woman would more easily reveal her secrets.

  His strategy had worked, but so had hers. As a result, he’d become as much her protector as she was his. She’d put her future in his hands. She’d defied orders. Risked her career. Her life.

  And now, because of him, she was on the run, arranging for illegal passports to get them from Spain into France and helping him track down whomever had had him kidnapped, tortured, rescued and then locked away again. The mission swelled with unknowns, each one making their chances of getting out alive more unlikely.

  Then again, dead wasn’t the worst thing that could happen.

  Worst was knowing that Sean might not be able to protect Brynn from whatever mess he’d inadvertently dragged her into. But while he might not be able to keep her out of danger, he could sure as hell give her a few stolen moments of intense pleasure.

  “You should get some sleep,” he murmured, his lips thrumming against her neck.

  His torture had been an open wound—her rescue, the tourniquet. Making love to her the first time had acted as a drug injected into his veins. When she wasn’t right beside him, he craved her. When he had her in his arms, he wanted to take on the whole world, starting with the spies, liars and killers who had sent them running halfway across the world from where he’d started.

  If he could let her go, she’d be safe.

  But he couldn’t bear the idea of pushing her away. Not when he needed her. Not when she needed him.

  “You’re my tonic,” she crooned, smoothing her hands over his cheeks and directing his face to hers. “I’ll sleep…after.”

  He could not deny her. In any other scenario, he might have been able to abandon her and find his own means across the border. Two, three months ago, that’s exactly what he would have done.

  But in the back room of that dank warehouse where he’d been tortured, he’d changed. He’d faced death, certain no one knew where he was. And even if they had, he could think of no one who would care enough to stage a rescue.

  Then, Brynn had come. She’d dragged him away from death and pushed him toward survival—to strength. How could he deny her anything now?

  He couldn’t.

  Under his touch, her clothes dissolved. Jeans. Panties. Bra. He slid her beneath the sheets, intending to explore her at his leisure, as if he had not blazed this exact path the day before—and the day before that and the day before that. But she surprised him by curling onto her stomach and hugging a pillow to her chest. She pulled her knees up slightly, offering him an unhampered view of her luscious backside, a part of her anatomy he had not worshipped nearly as much as it deserved.

  While he drew a lazy finger down her spine, pausing at the sweet depression at the small of her back, she dragged another cushion to cradle her cheek.

  “Angling for a massage, perhaps?” he asked.

  She turned her face, her saucy expression enhanced by the way her teeth tugged at her bottom lip. “I have been sitting in that chair, watching you sleep, for an awfully long time. I’m stiff.”

  “So am I.”

  “Do you know how to give a proper rubdown?” she asked.

  He grinned. “Doesn’t take a degree in physical therapy for a man to figure out how to rub his hands down a beautiful woman’s body.”

  “What if I want more than hands?” she asked.

  “Whatever the lady wants…”

  He tore the covers off the bed, wanting nothing in between him and her naked flesh. But in the interest of practicality, he kept his clothes on.

  They were on the run. Though they had no reason to suspect that anyone had followed them from the safe house in Barcelona to touristy San Sebastían, twenty kilometers from France, they had contacted a known forger as soon as they’d arrived. They needed passports to get across the border.

  To that end, they’d visited the nondescript apartment of a forger nicknamed el Creador, had their photos taken and their fake information recorded for transfer onto paperwork that would get them into France. Now, they simply had to wait for the man to work his magic.

  In the meantime, Sean would work his.

  While Brynn snuggled into the pillows, Sean stepped into the
bathroom and retrieved a basket of toiletries. On the way back, he double-checked the deadbolt on the door, did a brief visual out the window to the quiet side street below and, catching sight of nothing out of the ordinary, he pulled the blinds back into place.

  The night was chilly. As he climbed onto the bed beside her, a bristle of goose bumps spread across her skin.

  “You’re cold,” he said. “Maybe I should grab a blanket.”

  He made a half-hearted attempt to move, but she snagged his wrist. “There are other ways to warm me up, mister.” She laid her cheek on her arm and exhaled until she was the embodiment of relaxation. “Now get to work.”

  “You make it sound like touching you is some kind of chore, cher. If it is, I’m about to become the hardest-working man this side of Spain.”

  Under no other circumstances would Sean allow himself to indulge in such a blatant distraction when he was on a mission. Though he’d bucked the system during his time with the CIA, he’d never broken the strict protocol against fooling around when he was supposed to be vigilant.

  And where had those scruples gotten him?

  Alive and alone.

  With Brynn, Sean had already thrown the old rules out the window. He’d already formed a connection deeper than he’d ever imagined—deeper than he’d experienced with any other woman. But when they parted ways—and he knew without a doubt that they would—she’d remember him with no regrets.

  He couldn’t guarantee much in this life, but he could make sure of that.

  He dug into the toiletries, extracting a promising-looking lotion. He uncapped the top, took a sniff, then recapped it and warmed the tube by rolling it between his palms.

  “Hope you like vanilla,” he said before squirting the full contents into that fascinating indentation at her lower back.

  She shivered, squealing quietly as the temperature of the lotion yielded to the heat of her skin. “That’s a lot of lotion.”

  “I intend to spread it far and wide. And speaking of wide,” he said, drawing his hand from her ankle to between her knees, “I’m going to need you to open up for me, cher. I’m going to need to see if I’m achieving the desired effect.”

  Before he teased his fingers into the lotion, he stuffed a few more pillows under her, elevating her bottom so that she was almost on her knees. With her thighs spread and her ass raised, he spied the sweet, pink flesh of her sex and imagined it pulsing in anticipation of his touch. Not that he needed evidence to prove her arousal. He knew her telltale sounds. The coos. The squeals. The breathless sighs.

  This was the kind of covert intel a man should risk his life for.

  He swirled his finger into the reservoir of lotion he’d pooled on her back, drawing tendrils of scented emollient upward and outward, slickening his hands so that they glided over her flesh like hydrofoils over still water. He started at her shoulders, digging into the taut muscles before drawing the moist pressure down her arms, around her slims wrists and fingers. He teased his thumbs up and down her side as he went, avoiding contact with the fleshy curve of her breasts, knowing from the way she wriggled that she wanted his touch precisely where he was denying it.

  He flattened his hands on her shoulder blades, forcing her to remain in place.

  “You’re antsy,” he crooned.

  “I’m horny,” she confessed.

  Sean laughed. “That doesn’t fit with your image, you know. So cool, so collected, so in charge.”

  “So wanting you inside me,” she said, reaching out toward the waistband of his jeans.

  He slid aside. “Patience, cher. You know what they say—good things come to those who wait.”

  “Coming is the good thing.”

  He rewarded her pun with a long, luscious suckling at the back of her neck while he worked a magical path down the tight tendons protecting her spine. When he finally reached her ass, the muscles were taut but soft. Fleshy but wanting. He kissed each of the vertebrae from her neck downward, using lips and hands to pleasure every exposed centimeter of skin, which she rewarded by pulling her knees in close enough so that when he went up and over the curve of her backside, he had an unhampered view of her sex.

  “I’m all out of lotion,” he said with a groan, clutching her tightly so that his fingers imprinted on her flesh.

  She lifted a centimeter higher. “Sean, please.”

  He was done teasing. He reached between her legs, into the warmth between her thighs. This was slickness that couldn’t be copied by any lotion, couldn’t be mimicked by any exotic oil. This wetness was liquid silk, and he couldn’t help but stroke, rub and slide until she was crying out for him to take her over the edge.

  “More,” she begged. “You, Sean. More.”

  More.

  The simple word stopped him cold.

  Over the course of his adult life, Sean had given women his body. A few had received his loyalty and even fewer—namely, one—had been gifted with his chameleon’s ability to blend into the lines that separated truth and good from lies and betrayals.

  But Brynn wanted more.

  “More,” she repeated.

  “More,” he promised.

  He stripped off his clothes, grabbed her hips and lifted her so he could press his erection into the depths of her hot, needful sex. She cried out, begging again for “more, more, more.”

  He started to move. He held her tight and dropped his defenses, focusing only on giving her what she asked for.

  More.

  Two

  Something shifted. Something turned.

  The minute Sean tore off his clothes, the vibrations in the air crackled from a fire of pure lust into an inferno that burned straight through Brynn’s skin, muscle, sinew and bone.

  She could not breathe. She could not speak. She barely had the power to cry out in ecstasy when Sean slid inside her. Her body, hijacked by need, rejected any further input from her brain.

  She dragged herself up onto all fours. She wanted this. Only this—sex so elemental that the whole of her genetic makeup sparked to life. She curved her body to accommodate him. He braced his hands on her hips, clutching her, holding her steady as he drove into her, each stroke harder and faster, each connection bonded, then severed, then bonded again until she was his.

  Then the madness hit her. Like a smack against her flesh, the sensation sent her into a vortex of pleasure. He paused, but she rocked harder, demanding every last drop of what he had to give.

  Abandon.

  Freedom.

  Release.

  Half of her body collapsed back into the pillows while the other half remained under his control. He eased out of her, worshipping the roundness of her backside one last time before he snatched the sheets from the floor and floated them over her.

  She wanted to speak, but she had no words.

  As if he knew, he made a long, shushing noise. “Don’t move. I’ve got you.”

  She couldn’t stop shaking, not even after he went into the bathroom, doused a washcloth with warm water and returned to the bed. He made slow, steady work of cleaning her up, forbidding her from resisting with whispered orders that took the sting out of her sudden, physical helplessness.

  “Now sleep,” he instructed.

  She whined in protest, but he turned her over and silenced her with a kiss. Shamelessly, her body reacted, yearning for more of what she’d already had.

  With Sean, she could never get enough.

  “Hot damn, cher,” he murmured as she writhed against him. “When you say more, you’re not kidding.”

  She could waste her time wallowing in embarrassment over her insatiable desire, or she could brace her hands on his shoulders and push him down until his mouth was on her breast. She opted for the latter. He did not resist but instead threw himself into satisfying her wants, sucking and licking and kissing until she was lost entirely in the sensations only he could invoke.

  According to Sean, he was a mercenary—a man whose loyalty shifted as needed. Maybe he was, but
for now, he was hers. Her needs were simple and evident, and he read them like a blind man read Braille. His mouth and hands and tongue and fingers were everywhere, then nowhere, then centered in the spot where she needed him most. She coiled her hands into his hair like iron springs, stroking his scalp and tugging at the strands until her orgasm built up, burst and settled into a constant, low-frequency hum like white noise.

  As her quivering subsided, Sean slid beside her and cradled her close. He tangled his hands into hers and tucked them softly against her belly.

  “Now…sleep,” he ordered.

  She no longer had any choice. He’d overloaded her nervous system and zapped her reserves of strength. Oblivion was seconds away when he tugged her close and whispered something against her hair—a murmured promise she couldn’t process but still understood.

  He’d never forget her.

  Of course he wouldn’t. How could he when she had no intention of ever leaving him behind?

  * * *

  “I know you.”

  Of all the phrases Brynn had not wanted to hear after she slipped out of their hotel room to retrieve their dinner order from the lobby, I know you topped the list.

  The speaker, the unshaven, garlic-scented man whose only job had been to deliver their food, narrowed his red-rimmed eyes and gave her a once-over. His intense scrutiny tumbled through her like a series of earthquakes.

  Not that this was unusual. She hadn’t stopped trembling since she’d woken up.

  The night had slipped away. Sean had let her sleep well past dinnertime, so she’d insisted on being the one to go downstairs to collect their late-night food delivery while he took a shower. Luckily, this was Spain, where eating dinner close to midnight was a point of national pride.

  Not so luckily, the guy who worked as the restaurant’s gofer seemed convinced that he’d seen her before.

  “Excuse me?” she said, rolling out her best German accent.

  Sean might be the former CIA agent, but Brynn was no slouch in subterfuge. She hadn’t expected to be recognized, not when her last trip to this Basque tourist spot had been nearly two years ago.