She glanced down, saw what was holding him enthralled, and quickly uncrossed her arms.
“Damnit.” He frowned.
“I swear, all you men are the same. Put a pair of boobs in your face, and your IQ drops fifty points.”
“It’s biology, babe. Propagation of the species.”
“Whatever.” She adjusted her glasses. She looked absolutely adorable when she was being sincere. “I’m serious, Dagan. I need to know.”
“I’m sorry. My IQ is currently in the toilet… You need to know what?”
“Why you haven’t given me the time of day for years, but now, suddenly, you’ve turned into a kissy, handsy, bearded Don Juan. What gives?”
He could have told her everything. How he had wanted her from day one, but that Afghanistan had happened and his brother had happened and Senator Aldus had happened—and afterward he had never dreamed she would want anything to do with him. How he had continued to want her, to fantasize about her until his control had finally snapped back in Spider’s penthouse. How he had been, and still was, shocked as shit that she could know all his secrets and still want him, too. Yes, he could have told her all that.
Something held him back.
Maybe it was pride. Maybe it was shame. Or hell, maybe it was just self-preservation. Because if he laid himself open—ripped his ribs apart and exposed his heart—and she brushed him off, he wasn’t sure he would recover from the rejection.
“Professionalism,” he said.
She wrinkled her nose, causing her delightful cinnamon freckles to meld together. “Huh?”
“I didn’t make a move while we both worked for the Company because fraternization between employees was frowned upon. Same goes for after you became the liaison to BKI. We were coworkers. I had to respect that distinction.”
She narrowed her eyes, head canted to the side. He liked to call it her “thinking pose.” After a second she said, “But…aren’t we still coworkers?”
He’d dug himself into a hole, and the only way out was to keep digging with the hope he could break through to the other side. “That’s a negative. The minute you uploaded that virus onto Morrison’s PC—and the minute the boys back at BKI began hacking his systems and finding the evidence to bring the asslick down—was the beginning of the end for BKI. I’d say I am now officially a civilian. And you, babycakes, are now officially back to being a CIA counterintelligence officer. So, no more conflicts.”
He winked even though he was sure to burn in hell for the lies he had just told.
Chapter 12
Death by a thousand cuts.
That’s what it felt like to sit there, straddling Dagan Zoelner, the man Chelsea had lusted after for years, and hear him admit that all that time he had wanted her too. Especially since there was no way she could act on all the chemistry bubbling between them, not with the Big Bad Secret flying around over her head.
The awful thing was always there. And when she least expected it to, it would dive-bomb her like the seagulls had that time her mom and dad took her to Hilton Head for Labor Day weekend. Back when there had been money for vacations. Back before hardship and struggle and responsibility became the be-all, end-all of life.
So, yup. She was going to have to do one of the hardest things ever. She was going to have to turn down the oh-so-sexy man of her dreams.
Trouble was, she cared about him too much to reject him outright. She didn’t want to hurt him. He’d been hurt enough. So she racked her brain for a way to let him down easy.
There was always It’s not you, it’s me. But that was far too trite. She considered telling him she had an incurable, highly contagious venereal disease. But her pride wouldn’t let her go that far. So, that left her with…what?
The truth, a little voice whispered through her head.
The truth? Well, the truth was that she couldn’t make love to him because she wouldn’t be satisfied with a little bit of afternoon delight when what she’d fantasized about for years was a fairy-tale happily ever after. The truth was that they couldn’t have happily ever after because the minute they started down that path, she’d be forced to come clean about what had really happened in Afghanistan. The truth was that she…loved him.
And there it was.
The ultimate truth.
A long time ago, Chelsea had shoved it down deep, where she had hoped it would either become part of the fabric of her being or else lead to septic shock that would put her out of her misery.
“So what do you say?” Dagan prompted when she had been quiet for too long. “Want to put that condom in my wallet to good use?”
Yes! So much. But I…can’t.
Then the solution to her dilemma suddenly presented itself. She wouldn’t have to reject him if she could get him to reject her. Which should be easy enough, given that she knew his weaknesses, his worries, the responsibilities he had shouldered and refused to unburden himself of. It startled her, actually, how well she knew him.
“And if we act on this…thing”—she waved a hand between them, staunchly ignoring the feel of his erection pulsing between her legs—“what then? Like you said, you’re officially a civilian working at a custom chop shop in Chicago. And I’m back to being a counterintelligence officer at Langley.”
Instead of answering, Dagan grabbed her hand and splayed it against his, measuring the difference in size and texture. His palm was large and hard and callused. Hers was small and soft and unblemished. Threading their fingers together, he tugged her forward.
She could have resisted, she supposed. But if this was the last time she was in his arms, what harm could there be in allowing herself to revel for just a little longer?
With her breasts pillowed against his broad chest and the curve of her lower belly cushioning the steely evidence of his desire, his sweet breath fanned her face. She could have gone on just like that for eternity. Feeling him breathe. Feeling his heart beat in time with hers. Feeling his passion for her.
“Dagan.” Her voice was so scratchy it sounded like she’d been swallowing cockleburs. “I need you to answer me and…”
Any remaining words died quick deaths when he carefully removed her glasses. She blinked at him until he came into focus, then frowned when he folded the earpieces and set her glasses aside.
“Chelsea.” Once more, he settled his big hands on her hips and softly kneaded. When he said her name like that, she nearly had a mini-orgasm on the spot. “Don’t draw a line in the sand you can’t cross later.”
Her brow knitted. “I’m sorry. Did you just pull a Gollum on me? Was that some sort of riddle?”
He laughed. The low, rolling sound made her ovaries explode. If she looked around, she was certain she’d see eggs lying everywhere, just waiting to be fertilized. The flash of his straight, white teeth against the backdrop of the Beard was enough to stop her heart, and in her head, she didn’t hear Gollum’s voice, but Yoda’s saying, The Devastating Grin Game is strong with this one. She was obviously getting her odd, pointy-eared gnomes mixed up.
“I’m saying that for right now, let’s forget about the past, stop thinking about the future, and just live in the moment.”
And there it was. Her plan was falling into place perfectly.
So why does it hurt so much?
“Said every boy in the backseat of his car on prom night,” she told him with a wry twist of her lips.
It was utterly fake, her grin. Because what she really wanted was to curl up in the corner and have a good cry. Just whimper and wail and curse the decision that had brought her here, to this moment, when she was presented with a dream—the dream of him—and forced to turn away from it.
“And like the backseat on prom night, let’s make some sweet memories.”
“I’m saying,” she said, “that if you’ll hold your horses and try thinking with your big head instead of Little Z�
��s head—”
“Just FYI,” he interrupted, “there’s nothing little about Little Z.”
Don’t I know it, she thought. Because some things were obvious, even covered by a layer of thick denim. What she said was, “My point is that what we start here today is doomed to come to a quick and decisive end once we’re back stateside and hundreds of miles away from each other.”
His brow puckered. “Are you saying you don’t want that, or you do want that?”
“I’m saying I’m thirty-two years old and way past the point of settling for a two-pump chump.”
“Excuse me?” He could not have looked more offended if he’d tried. “I have never been a two-pump chump. Feel free to ask any of the women I’ve been with. They’ll tell you I—”
She shoved a finger over his mouth because the last thing she wanted to talk about was the women he’d had. His whiskers tickled her skin and reminded her of how those same whiskers had tickled her neck and her ear and… “Z, I’m trying to make you understand that what I want and what you want are two entirely different things. So it’s better to stop this crazy train before it has a chance to go off the rails.”
“What happened to Dagan?”
“Huh?”
“Since we came down here, you’ve been calling me Dagan. But just now you went back to calling me Z. Why?”
She sat up and frowned at him. “I didn’t realize I was doing it, I guess. Dagan or Z, it’s all the same to me. Both are you.” Although that wasn’t quite true. Calling him Dagan had always felt so…intimate. Too intimate. “Why? You have a preference?”
“I like the way my name sounds on your lips,” he said. “With just the hint of that Southern drawl.”
The words themselves were innocuous, taken one by one. But put them together and combine them with his deep, moonshine voice, and they were an invitation to sin. Her mouth went bone-dry.
Funny, considering other parts of me are the opposite.
“Stop trying to change the subject,” she scolded him.
“Is that what I’m doing?” She felt his smile in her bones. Deeper. In her soul.
“Yes. You’re doing everything in your power to detour this conversation straight toward Sexy Town.”
“But it’s such a nice destination, don’t you think?”
Oh, how easy it would be to just let him have his way! But…then what?
“Look, I know Little Z is calling the shots right now, but just for a couple of seconds would it be possible for me to talk to Big Z?”
To ensure both their minds were focused on the conversation, she crawled off him. Sitting on the cold floor she immediately missed his fiery warmth. She tried to generate her own heat by pulling her legs up and wrapping her arms around her shins. A glint of purple from her discarded glasses caught her eye and had her reaching for them. Sliding them on, the world around her went from soft, fuzzy shapes to hard, sharp edges—including Dagan.
He was the human equivalent of a hard, sharp edge. And she studiously avoided looking at the fly of his jeans when he sighed and pushed into a seated position. His legs looked a mile long as he stretched them out and crossed them at the ankles. “First of all, I call a permanent moratorium on the phrase Little Z. And second of all, do you realize the expression on your face makes you look like you’re about to give birth to an oversized, ill-tempered hedgehog?”
“Nice.” Chelsea frowned at him. “Very nice.”
He curled a big, warm hand around her ankle, all trace of humor gone. “Okay, babe, I give.” Babe. A simple endearment. But it hit her so hard that she lost her breath. “Say whatever it is you need to say. Big Z is all ears.”
Chapter 13
Chelsea pursed her bee-stung lips, and Dagan was sorely tempted to lean forward and take her up on the invitation she’d unwittingly sent him. But something was…off with her. So he remained where he was, satisfying himself with simply touching her, watching as her big, expressive eyes searched his face.
The longer she looked at him, the more he felt his chances of being with her slipping through his fingers. It reminded him of the mist that had crept over Lake Erie in the springtime. Or his brother’s sobriety in those early years. Here one minute, gone the next. Impossible to hold on to.
His heart beat sickly. Maybe he had been wrong to hope. Maybe there really was no way a woman like her could—
“I’m done playing the field,” she told him in a rush. That sounded fine by him. Just the idea of her with another man… Uh, no. Negative. No fuckin’ way. “I want a man who’s ready to take the next steps in life. Who’s ready for marriage. Who wants children.”
Marriage? Children? Seriously?
With Black Knights Inc. going civilian, he didn’t know where he’d be in a year, who he’d be in a year. He was no mechanic, so there’d be nothing for him to do for the shop. Not to mention there was Avan.
Always, there is Avan.
His mind was ripped back to the day of his father’s aneurysm. Dagan had been home on spring break from graduate school, and Avan was about to finish his freshman year at Ohio State University. They had all been in the kitchen, laughing over some ridiculous thing involving their batty neighbor who kept potbellied pigs. And then their father had suddenly stopped and sat down on the linoleum floor right beside the kitchen table.
Dagan remembered exchanging a look with Avan before squatting beside his father…
“Dad?” He squeezed his old man’s knee. “What’s up?”
His father looked up at him, and there was something funny going on with his eyes. “Head,” his father said, sounding breathless, blinking quickly. “Pop.”
Dagan didn’t know much about human biology, other than what he had learned in his science classes, but he knew something was definitely wrong with his dad. Fear became a poisonous flower that bloomed in his chest as he turned to Avan. “Call 911!” he yelled, then swung back to his father. “Dad, hang on, okay? We’ll have help coming soon.”
His father stared up at him, but there was a haze in his eyes, as if he couldn’t see clearly. The grip of his dad’s hand when he grabbed Dagan’s shoulder, however, was as strong as ever. “Take care…” His father shuddered. In pain? In fear? Dagan didn’t know. He was so helpless. So wretchedly helpless.
“Yes!” he heard his brother yelling into the phone. “That’s right! Come right away! I think my dad is having a stroke or a heart attack or—”
“Dagan.” His father’s hand squeezed tighter.
“Don’t try to talk, Dad. Just—”
“Your brother.” His father cut him off. “Take care of…” He shuddered again. “Your brother.”
“I will, Dad. I—”
“Promise.” The hand on his arm had become a vise.
“I swear it! But, Dad, you don’t have to—”
That’s all Dagan managed before his father’s eyes rolled back and he tumbled to his side, dead.
Dagan’s flashbacks didn’t always involve Afghanistan.
And that promise? The promise to take care of Avan? Well, he’d failed to keep it at first. He had been too busy in graduate school, then too busy being recruited by and going to work for the CIA. But the day he had received that call in Afghanistan that Avan was in the hospital recovering from an overdose was the day he had known he could no longer shirk his duty to his brother or sidestep his promise to his father.
He had put in for a transfer stateside and had gone about handing off his assets to other agents. Then had come the bombing and his ultimate ejection from the CIA.
With no job and very limited savings, Dagan hadn’t had the cash to book his brother into the ninety-day recovery program Avan had so desperately needed. So when Senator Aldus had approached Dagan about an off-the-books job to find missing files, Dagan had jumped at the chance to make some much-needed moolah. Little had he known that the senator
was corruption incarnate, and the files Dagan had been hired to retrieve were proof of Aldus’s criminal endeavors. By the time he had found out, it was almost too late.
Luckily for him, that job for the senator had put him in the path of the Black Knights. They had seen something in him. Something beyond the dishonorable discharge from the Company. Something more than the man who’d been duped by one of his own government officials.
They had offered him a job, and it had paid for Avan’s rehab. Both that first time, and then again two years later when Avan fell off the wagon.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
But it wasn’t the past that was making Dagan’s heart beat too fast now. It was the future. Where would he go? What would he do? How would he continue to keep an eye on his little brother or make the money it would take to put Avan through rehab for a third time, should he need it?
Dagan knew the answers to none of that. Was terrified of all those unknowns, in fact. And here was Chelsea talking about marriage and children.
“For God’s sake, Chels.” Dagan ran a hand over his beard. “Don’t we get to have fun before we get serious?”
“That’s my point.” She speared him with a knowing look. “No. We don’t. Or at least I don’t. I know you, Z.” He really wished she’d go back to calling him Dagan. “I know you haven’t thought about what happens after we scratch our itch.” The fact that she’d hit the proverbial nail on the head made him shift uncomfortably. “Are you going to move to Washington to be with me? Are you going to leave Avan in Chicago to fend for himself?”
“I…” He shook his head, unable to go on. He could hear the mad rush of blood in the hollows of his ears.
Her expression softened, and she reached down to pat the hand he still had wrapped around her ankle. She might have the curves of an Amazon, but she had the bones of a bird, so small, so fragile. “I know,” she said. “Let’s agree to be friends, okay?”
The sickly beat of his heart had turned positively bilious. “Naked friends?” He forced a smile he knew didn’t come within spitting distance of his eyes.
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