What in the world? Chelsea frowned. Then her frown slid into a slack-jawed, bug-eyed stare because she figured out what had caused Emily’s outburst.
It was Dagan.
And he was naked.
Well, not completely naked. He was wearing his skivvies. And. Nothing. Else.
Just for the record—God knows I’m mentally recording this—his skivvies were a pair of black boxer briefs with a red elastic waistband printed with the letters SAXX. His shoulders looked impossibly wide, his various tattoos dark and menacing, and the smattering of hair on his chest was so crinkly and coarse-looking and…male that everything that was female inside Chelsea sat up and starting panting like a good little doggie waiting for a treat.
Gimme, gimme, gimme!
She followed the hair on his chest until it became a single line that traveled down the center of his abdomen, leading to her own personal apocalypse. And speaking of her own personal apocalypse, the briefs presented a rather large bulge that apparently even icy water couldn’t shrink to a respectable size.
Blowing out a ragged breath, she shook her head and chuckled. Even to her own ears, it sounded weak and defeated. “Well, well, Z. The good Lord was just showing off when he made you, wasn’t he?”
Chapter 19
There were times in Dagan’s life—after Afghanistan, after Senator Aldus, the second time he’d had to haul his little brother to rehab—when he had seriously considered dragging a knife over his skin just so he could feel something besides guilt and regret.
The moment he heard Emily scream that Chelsea was bleeding was the moment he knew the knife was no longer needed. He felt so much more.
In the two seconds it had taken him to race from behind the piling he’d chosen as his changing room to the piling behind which the women had stationed themselves, he felt terror. Then, when he spied Chelsea crouched next to her backpack, looking whole and mostly unharmed, he felt the kind of relief that made his knees weak.
As if those two emotions weren’t proof positive that he was past the self-mutilation stage, the look on Chelsea’s face when she let her eyes drag over him had filled him with lust. But more than that, when she’d made that remark about God showing off, grinning that Chelsea grin of hers that was enough to move the loss that was this shitty-ass day directly into the win column, he was overcome by a wave of affection. Soul-shaking affection. The kind of affection he had never felt for another living human. The kind of affection he thought might skate precariously close to that crazy little thing called…love.
Holy fuckin’ shit, was he in love with Chelsea Duvall?
He searched inside himself and could find zero evidence to the contrary.
“Why do I suddenly get the feeling that I’m about as welcome here as a fart in church?” Emily muttered.
He was careful not to look directly at Emily. In fact, it occurred to him that he probably shouldn’t be looking directly at Chels either. You know, given she was dressed in nothing but her bra and panties—her ridiculously complicated-looking bra and her far-too-sexy matching lace panties. Or were they called boy shorts? He thought maybe that was the right name for the scrap of lace that hugged her hips and rode high on her amazing ass to reveal the bottom half of each succulent, drool-worthy cheek.
In an effort not to spring a boner, he forced himself to stare down at his toes and concentrated on visualizing his middle-school gym teacher. Mr. Papazian had been three hundred pounds of hairy Armenian.
“How bad are you hurt, Chels?” Whoa. Was that his voice? It sounded like he’d run his vocal cords over sandpaper.
“Not bad,” she assured him. “It’s just a scrape, really. I didn’t do a very good job of avoiding one of the pilings on my way to shore.”
Movement from the corner of his eye told him Emily was shrugging into a sweatshirt, and he bit back the urge to tell Chelsea she could have avoided getting hurt altogether if she’d just manned a damned desk like she’d been trained to do. But Emily had said that comments like that didn’t actually express his concern, and instead made him sound like a jackass.
“Mind if I take a look anyway?” He was careful to pose it as a question instead of a demand. “Just for my own peace of mind.”
“Aww!” Emily cried, batting her lashes and clasping her hands together. “Look at you, Zoelner. Being all sweet and concerned and accommodating. Give me a minute to clean myself up from the puddle I just melted into.”
Convinced Emily was decent, he allowed himself to gift her with a steely-eyed frown.
“Ouch!” She stepped back. “Okay, okay. Stop shooting me with your eye bullets. I’ll leave you two alone. Just let me grab my stuff.” Her South Side accent turned it into Just lemme grab ma stuff.
After bending to snag her socks and shoes, she shouldered her backpack and ambled past him. But not before she stopped to whisper in his ear, “Go get her, lover boy.”
As if that wasn’t sophomoric enough, she actually had the temerity to give him a nudge. He didn’t dare look at her for fear she’d add a wink.
“Do I want to know what she told you?” Chelsea asked after Emily had picked her way toward a distant piling.
Having pushed to a stand, Chelsea held a sweatshirt in front of herself. It was a crying shame to see all those luscious curves covered up, but Dagan took heart that he still had an unobstructed view of her sweetly turned legs and her delicate, unpainted toes. He had never been a foot man before, but the desire to kiss every one of those cute little digits was sharp.
And then work my way up.
No. No. None of that. He had more important things to deal with.
“Can I check your wound?” he asked again. He wasn’t sure why it was so important to him. Obviously she wasn’t hurting that bad. If she was, he’d be able to hear it in her voice, right? Like he’d been able to see the regret on her face down in the hold of Rusty’s boat when she gave him what amounted to an ultimatum.
Her mouth quirked. “How about we both put some clothes on first? Aren’t you freezing?”
He was. Goose bumps peppered his skin, and his bare toes ached all the way to the bones. “Two minutes,” he told her gruffly, then turned to trudge back to his gear.
After tugging on a dry pair of jeans and another thick wool sweater, he donned fresh socks and shoved his size twelves into his biker boots. Clodhoppers, Chelsea teasingly called them. He supposed that was as good a description as any. Though, for the life of him, he couldn’t remember the last clod he had hopped.
He wasn’t sure it had been a full two minutes by the time he finished wringing out his wet clothes and stuffing them in the front section of his backpack. Shrugging into his coat, he found himself back beside Chelsea’s piling.
There was a part of him—the guy part—that hoped to catch her in the process of shimmying into her jeans. He could quite easily imagine the wiggle of her lovely lady bits. But to his disappointment, she had already slipped into her denims and had pulled on her sweatshirt and coat.
Well, she’d pulled the latter two pieces of clothing half on, anyway. She had left her damaged arm uncovered, the left side of the sweatshirt bunched up around her neck. “Here. See?” She presented him with her arm. “It’s not so bad.”
She was right. The wound didn’t appear very deep. Still… “Barnacles carry tons of bacteria. When we get to Rusty’s, we need to clean this thing and slather it in ointment. Until then…”
He unzipped the side pocket on his pack and pulled out a roll of gauze. Always be prepared. He and Avan had gone through the Boy Scout program together, and that was one lesson that had stuck. “We’ll wrap it so it doesn’t ooze onto your sweatshirt.”
She adjusted her glasses. “I feel like this is much ado about nothing.”
Winding the gauze around her laceration, he tried his best not to look at the bottom edge of her bra or the smooth skin of her side where
her waist dipped in dramatically before flaring out to her hips. When that didn’t work, he thought it best to force his mind onto something else.
“Shakespeare?”
“Huh?” She blinked up at him.
Eyes like hers should be outlawed. They were hell on a man’s self-control.
“Much Ado about Nothing?”
“Oh.” She shrugged. “Never read it. Watched the movie with Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh about a hundred times, though. Love the language. But Keanu Reeves was a weird casting choice for Don John, don’t you think?”
“The accent he used was pretty bad,” Dagan agreed, thinking it a marvel that after the day they’d had, they could still carry on a normal conversation.
But that was Chelsea for you. She was a phenom when it came to reading Intelligence. She loved fantasy novels and, apparently, Shakespearean movies about love. And she was the only person on the face of the planet he could be himself around. Talking to her…loving her—yes, he was no longer in denial about that—was just so easy.
What wasn’t easy was trying not to keel over. Because when he leaned close to use his teeth to tear off the gauze, he was hit by the sweet strawberry-vanilla smell of her.
“You two lovebirds ready to rock and roll?” Emily called, stomping toward them as Chelsea tucked her bandaged arm into her sweatshirt and coat.
“Bloody hell, woman!” Christian complained. “Give me a moment to get into my shoes!”
Emily stopped in her tracks, her expression turning positively devilish before she swung around to smile at Christian, who was sitting on the ground, tying the laces on a pair of Italian-made ankle boots that probably cost more than Dagan’s last car.
“Now why did you automatically think I was talking to you and Ace?” Emily asked. “Is there something the two of you would like to tell the rest of us?”
“He should be so lucky!” Ace called, trotting out from behind a piling, fully dressed and carrying his backpack and the two folded float bags.
Dagan turned back to Chelsea, offering his hand. “You ready?”
She looked down at his callused palm with a considering frown. For a moment, he thought she would balk—and that would tell him something, wouldn’t it? Something he didn’t want to know? Like maybe that whole I’m done playing the field shtick was just her way of letting him down easy? So when she slipped her fingers into his, he wanted to shout with joy.
Ace beelined toward the edge of the pier, and Emily and Christian wasted no time tagging along after him. Dagan pulled Chelsea into step behind the trio, keeping his fingers laced with hers. He realized that despite all the ways his day had gone wrong, holding hands with Chelsea made everything seem right. And for the first time in a long time he was…happy.
Which in his experience meant the proverbial shit was about to hit the fan.
Chapter 20
A2 Southbound
“What do you know?”
A valid question, given that Steven had been on the phone he had borrowed from Morrison since they began their drive south. Still, he wished the demanding old bugger would give him a second or two to arrange his thoughts. There was something…
“What did they say?” Morrison added.
Steven glanced across the backseat of Morrison’s SUV—just one of the many vehicles in the billionaire’s stables—at the man himself, the one who had gotten him into this unholy mess. He fought to keep the scowl from his face. If he had learned one lesson in life, it was that it was always best to play his emotional cards close to his vest.
“There’s no sight of them at the Chunnel entrance. And so far nothing on the water either. CCTV footage shows the Ducatis parked by the docks in Dover, but nothing more than that. The revolving cameras are set on a fifteen-minute timer, and they didn’t catch the moment the group arrived or if they boarded a vessel. The Border Agency has tracked and searched every ship that has docked or disembarked from the Dover docks today. So far, nothing.”
Morrison’s top lip curled back, revealing a set of teeth that had been polished to perfection. Those stark white teeth had always made Steven uncomfortable. They reminded him of sharks’ teeth. And he couldn’t help but picture those teeth sinking into the neck of some innocent—
“That’s disappointing,” Morrison said, interrupting Steven’s thoughts. It was just as well. The images that had begun to form in Steven’s head were enough to make him retch.
“It’s more than disappointing. It’s bloody frustrating,” he grumbled.
Every hour that ticked by, he felt the blade of the guillotine hovering above his head slip a little more. Still, he couldn’t focus on the fear living inside him. There was still work to be done. There was still a chance he could make it out of this unscathed.
“And suspicious,” he added, running through scenarios. As a former SAS officer, he knew how operators like the three who had burst into Morrison’s office thought.
“Suspicious?” Morrison lifted a bushy gray eyebrow, his eyes sharp. He might like to act the aging playboy, but Steven knew that was all smoke and mirrors. Morrison’s parties, his ready smile, his boozy debaucheries and fat-bottomed women were just icing covering a poisonous cupcake. “Suspicious in what way?”
“Our friend inside Scotland Yard said that the HMC Valiant reported following a cod boat from Dover to Folkestone and back to Dover. According to the Border Agency blokes, the vessel kept making odd course corrections.”
“Did they search the boat?”
“Yes.”
“Well? What did they find?”
“Nothing but the captain and a fair bit of bait.”
“I’m sorry.” Morrison blinked. “Why is that suspicious?”
“I’m not sure as yet.” Steven punched Redial on the borrowed mobile.
When the man from Scotland Yard answered, Steven wasted no time with pleasantries. “The captain of that cod boat you spoke of, what was his name?”
“Rusty Parker,” came the reply.
“Rusty? Sounds American.”
“Is American.”
As Alice would say, curiouser and curiouser. “Thank you.” Steven thumbed off the mobile and took a deep breath. The smell of Morrison’s expensive cologne filled his nostrils, and he wondered how Morrison’s driver, a man by the improbable name of Ramón, could stand being confined in such a small space with the evil old fart day after day.
He glanced at the rearview mirror to find Ramón concentrating on the motorway in front of him, piloting the SUV with easy efficiency. Ramón must have felt Steven’s attention, but he never took his eyes off the road. Steven pictured him as one of those figurines depicting the three monkeys. Ramón saw no evil, heard no evil, spoke no evil.
Steven absently wondered if that might work for him too.
Too late, a little voice whispered.
“What are you thinking?” Morrison asked.
“I think something smells off.” Lifting the borrowed phone, he dialed Benton’s number. The hacker genius picked up on the first ring. “Who’s this?”
“Surry,” he said. “Are you too busy with things on your end to do a little online digging for me?”
“No.” Steven could hear Benton slurping something noisily through a straw. “I just built a firewall so high it will take this wankstick hours to climb it. Tell me what you need.”
“I need you to find out anything and everything you can about a man named Rusty Parker.” He gave Benton the information he had on the bloke. That he was American, that he owned a cod boat anchored in Dover. “See if you can find a connection between him and Chelsea Duvall.”
“Done.”
The click of the line told him Benton had signed off.
Steven was still trying to figure out what was niggling at the edges of his instincts when Morrison interrupted his thoughts. “And while Benton works his ma
gic, what shall you and I do?”
“Keep on ’til Dover.”
“I feel a bit Bondish, even if I do say so myself.” When Morrison smiled, all teeth and with a sick twinkle in his eye, Steven fought the urge to recoil.
Chapter 21
Folkestone, England
Rusty Parker’s home wasn’t what Emily would have expected from an outdoorsman.
It was three stories of blue-painted exterior, with an interior that managed to be both chic and warm. Neutral walls were covered in eclectic artwork—most having some sort of nautical theme. Big, comfy furniture was home to the occasional throw pillow. And the old oak floors were so heavily lacquered that she would swear she could see her reflection in the places not covered by brightly hued rugs.
She had chosen the top-floor bathroom to shower off the salt and foam from the Channel—neither smell had proved very pleasant when her body heat had begun to enhance them on the walk from the pier to Rusty’s house. As she toweled her hair dry and made her way to the bottom floor to join her freshly bathed coworkers in the living room, she realized she was out of ideas on how to get them off this giant, pain-in-the-ass rock known as Great Britain.
Rusty had been her ace in the hole.
“So what’s the plan now?” she asked before she’d stepped off the bottom tread.
Strategizing, preparing, taking action…those were her fortes. Sitting around twiddling her thumbs and scratching her ass had always made her feel twitchy. In fact, she was pretty sure that had there been such a diagnosis when she was a kid—or if her parents hadn’t been so busy looking for love in all the wrong places—it might have been determined that she had a touch of ADHD.
Ace was on the phone and lifted a finger for silence. Never something Emily had been very good at, but she obligingly bit her tongue. Then, after a few seconds during which he said a lot of “okays” and “roger that’s,” he finally thumbed off his phone and sighed.
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