Fuel for Fire

by Julie Ann Walker

  She didn’t like the sigh. Sighs like that usually meant bad news. Paulie Konerko had heaved one very similar sigh when he told the press back in 2014 that he planned to retire from White Sox baseball—a loss she continued to mourn. Her mother had sighed like that when she told Emily she was divorcing her third husband, a man Emily had loved and adored. Richard, her FAS, had heaved a sigh that sounded a lot like Ace’s when he had called her a heartless bitch and told her that he couldn’t work with her another day.

  When she thought about it, the list of times she’d heard sighs like that seemed endless.

  “Ozzie’s having trouble accessing Morrison’s data,” Ace said. “Something to do with another hacker throwing obstacles in his way.”

  “Ruddy inconvenient,” Christian grumbled.

  Ace shrugged. His wet blond hair looked almost brown in the low lights of the lamps parked on the big oak end tables. The gray day’s mood had turned from mildly unhappy to full-on sulky. Rain was imminent.

  March in England. Gotta love it.

  “He says he’ll beat the fuckhead—his word for the guy, not mine—but it could take some time,” Ace explained. “In the meantime, Angel has changed his destination. Instead of Calais, he’s on his way to Le Touquet. Apparently he knows a guy who has a submersible we might be able to use.”

  Emily blinked, her mind stopping on the word submersible. “Is that covert operator speak for a flippin’ submarine?”

  “A small one.” Ace nodded.

  As if size made a difference…er…at least in this particular case? Big or small, a submarine was a submarine. Emily tried to comprehend how, from this morning until now, they had managed to veer off the road and careen crazily toward that little place she liked to call O’Shitsburgh.

  Or maybe that should be Underwater O’Shitsburgh.

  “Do we, uh… Do we want to know what this friend of Angel’s does with a submarine off the coast of France?” she asked.

  “Probably not.” Ace made a face. “This is Angel we’re talking about.”

  Right. Jamin “Angel” Agassi. Not his real name.

  In point of fact, Emily didn’t know his real name. She wasn’t entirely sure anyone back at BKI did either. What she did know was that Agassi was a former Israeli Mossad agent who had run into a heap of trouble. Trouble so big and bad he had been forced to abandon his post, abandon his country, undergo extensive plastic surgery to completely change his looks, and then, you know, have his vocal cords scoured so that voice recognition software couldn’t identify him.

  As if all that wasn’t intriguing—or spooky—enough, after he had come to work for BKI, he had taken on a string of blacker-than-black assignments that had mostly kept him overseas. Emily had only met the man twice. Each time, she had been taken aback by his near-flawless beauty. Whichever plastic surgeon had done the work on him had been a Rembrandt. A true artist. No joke. She thought the Black Knights had been right to give him the nickname Angel.

  With black, wavy hair and piercing eyes that looked like they held a thousand secrets, he was downright otherworldly. Which, quite honestly, creeped her out. And made her not trust him.

  Not entirely, anyway.

  Then again, beggars couldn’t be choosers. If Angel and his friend with the submarine could get them off the island, she’d thank her lucky stars and him.

  “So then the plan will be to hop onto…er…into this dude’s submarine and Captain Nemo our asses across the Channel?” She tried not to imagine the giant squid from Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea wrapping its long, muscular tentacles around the vessel and dragging it down to the black depths until the hull buckled and—

  Squeeeeeeeee! The kettle on the stove began singing its ear-piercing tune. On the heels of the giant squid imagery, it made Emily jump.

  “Pretty much,” Ace agreed. “Assuming Angel can find this friend of his, and also assuming this friend of his will be willing to help. Angel says it could take an hour or two to locate the guy. He’ll give us a call once he does. But there’s a catch.”

  “There always is,” Christian muttered on his way past Emily. He sauntered into the kitchen where Zoelner was busy washing and redressing Chelsea’s wound. After pouring himself a cup, Christian dropped in a teabag and strolled back to the living room.

  Emily couldn’t help but notice he carried himself with an easy, almost lazy confidence. It stirred something deep inside her. Something she promptly ignored.

  Once bitten, twice shy, baby. She would not mess up the good thing she had going with the Black Knights. Although one look at Christian, and she was sorely tempted.

  “The submersible is only big enough for the pilot and two passengers,” Ace said. “So sneaking us all across will take hours.”

  Emily frowned. “But really it’s just Chelsea who needs to sneak across, right? Spider and his contacts inside the British government don’t know about the rest of us.”

  “Thanks for the all-for-one and one-for-all attitude, Em!” Chelsea called from the kitchen.

  “You know I love you like my luggage!” Emily called back. Then, “But seriously, we could load Chelsea into the submarine, and then the rest of us could grab a ferry across or else take the train through the Chunnel. All on the up and up. Easy as you pleasy.”

  Plus, the plan had the added benefit of allowing Emily to avoid a chance run-in with a giant squid. And yes, she knew that particular concern was ludicrous, but that didn’t mean it went away. Obviously she’d read Twenty-Thousand Leagues when she was too young and too impressionable.

  Where had her parents been?

  Oh yeah. Out. They had always been out. Each of them more concerned with finding the next love of their life—and the next, and the next, and the next—than looking after their own daughter.

  “Good point.” Christian’s eyes darted to his watch. “On that note, and since it seems like we’ll have a while to knock about regardless, what say we toddle over to the local pub? I don’t know about the rest of you, but it’s going on sixteen hundred, and I haven’t eaten since breakfast. I’m getting peckish.”

  “Chelsea can’t go out.” Emily glanced over her shoulder at the woman under discussion, giving her a wink that said, See? I got a sister’s back. “Not with her mug splashed all over the news.”

  “We’ll fetch her back something,” Christian insisted.

  “But Rusty said there was food in the fridge.”

  “Tuna salad, a block of cheddar cheese, and a carton of milk do not a meal make, darling.” Just like always, the endearment gave Emily a little thrill. “Besides,” he continued, “if we go ’round to the pub, it’ll give us a chance to have a pint and see if we can come up with a viable alternative, should Angel’s friend not come through for us. You know, drink things through, as is the custom of my people.”

  Christian Watson was English through and through, right down to his love of Earl Grey and beer. Both served warm. Bleck!

  “You guys go,” Zoelner called from the kitchen. “I’ll stay here and keep Chelsea company.”

  I just bet you will, Emily thought, hiding a smile. She knew the two of them needed time alone to work out their shit, so she was quick to jump on the bandwagon and add, “Come to think of it, I could really benefit from a plate of fish and chips.”

  “Good girl!” Christian clapped his hands and plucked his coat from the hall tree on the way to the door.

  And that was how, two minutes later, Emily found herself walking down a quiet Folkestone street while all of England was on the hunt for her friend and coworker.

  Life as a supersecret agent was weird indeed. People expected that it was all gas, no brakes. But the truth of the matter was that between bouts of chasing down the bad guys and running for their lives, there were long stretches of the everyday. Laundry. Bills. A walk to the pub for fish and chips because, you know, a girl needs to eat!
>
  She contemplated the surrealism of it all as a light drizzle began to fall.

  Gotta love England, she thought again. Chancing a glance at Christian, she admitted the man had more jawline than any mortal should. Gotta love Englishmen too, she silently added.

  Chapter 22

  Chelsea watched Dagan tape the ends of a fresh length of gauze around her arm. He had cleaned, medicated, and redressed the wound. All very carefully. All very precisely. All very slowly. And it wasn’t an exaggeration to say the entire procedure had wreaked havoc on her respiratory system.

  She was dizzy. The room spun around and around. In the center of all that tumult? Him. Z. Dagan.

  Who knew being close to a man could actually make you hyperventilate?

  He stepped back, eyeing his work, and managed to look both rakish—it was that damp curl of hair over his brow—and ridiculously pleased with himself. “Well?” he asked. “What do you think?”

  She gave the fresh bandage only the most cursory of glances. She was too busy watching his eyes in the low glow of the glass pendant light above the sink.

  Dear Lord, why did you have to go and make him so irresistible?

  “It’s good,” she allowed with a dip of her chin, pulling the sleeve of her sweatshirt down. “Thank you for taking care of it. For taking care of me. You tend to do that, don’t you?”

  He smiled at her. Oh, how he smiled at her! It felt like the most beautiful gift, but also like a slap in the face. If he ever found out about the Big Bad Secret, he might never smile at her again.

  “If you think that’s good”—he waggled his eyebrows—“you should see my moves in the boudoir.”

  In the last handful of hours, their chemistry had managed to bust down the walls he had built around himself. He was still as formidable and bullheaded as ever, but now there was a side of flippancy and playfulness too. Basically, he was back to acting like the man she had met all those years ago when she was a wet-behind-the-ears CIA recruit.

  It was that side of him, the irreverent side, that she had desperately missed. The side that had disappeared after Afghanistan.

  Afghanistan…

  The thought made her ache as if her bones were covered in bruises.

  Fearing he might see, she adjusted her glasses and donned her best reproachful look. “First of all, I don’t cotton to cocky men.”

  “Sure you do.” He winked.

  “Second of all, we’ve been over this.” She clung to the decree she’d made inside the catamaran’s hold like she clung to the memory of her father and the responsibility she had to her mother.

  “True.” He rubbed a hand over his beard—the Beard—and his callused palm rasped against the hairs. The sound had warmth coalescing in her core. Then he made it so much worse when he suddenly stepped between her legs and placed his wide-palmed hands on her waist.

  She had dutifully sat on the kitchen counter while he tended her wound, and she had yet to jump down. Oh, why didn’t I jump down? It would have been so much easier to avoid his advances if she had been flat on her feet so she could…what? Run?

  That would have been really mature.

  Dagan pulled her to the edge of the counter. Not gently. But not hard, either. Just…authoritatively. A man in charge.

  Weak-willed ninny that she was, she experienced a rush of pleasure. That pleasure only increased when he pressed against her and she discovered he was hard. And pulsing.

  Oh my! Dagan Zoelner in full-on seduction mode rated an F5 on the Fujita scale for nipple-tightening, panty-slicking, knee-loosening damage.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay, Chels.”

  She didn’t know what the heckfire he was okaying. “Okay what?”

  “I’m willing to give it a try.”

  “Give…uh…” She had to swallow. “Give what a try?”

  “Us,” he said the word simply. But it was not a simple word. It was a crazily complex word. And it was enough to send her heart plummeting into her churning stomach where acid immediately went to work on it.

  Her plan, her glorious plan, had backfired. Big time.

  “I think we should give us a try,” he added. “I mean, I’m not asking you to marry me this instant. And I have no idea how we’re going to work out the details. My future is a huge question mark. What happens after BKI shuts its clandestine doors? Am I really supposed to be satisfied building bikes for a living? I’m a trained Intelligence agent, for God’s sake. And what about Avan? What if he falls off the wagon again? If I’m not making good money, I won’t be able to afford his treatment. All of this terrifies me, Chels. I hate the unknown. Always have. But wanting you…it’s the one thing I do know, the one thing I’m sure of. So for now, I say let’s let the future happen when it happens. For now, I say okay.”

  Oh no. Oh no! The time had finally come. She would have to do what she had hoped and dreamed and prayed she would never had to do. She would have to tell him the truth. Expose her guilt and shame and dishonor and finally face the consequences she had spent years avoiding.

  “Dagan…”

  Something dark and exciting sparkled in his eyes. “Say it again.”

  “Dagan, I—”

  That’s all she managed before he groaned, the sound low and male and deliciously sexy. He cupped her jaw in his rough hands. Then his lips claimed hers.

  Her mouth formed a surprised O, and he took that as encouragement to dip his tongue inside. Slow, savoring licks… That’s how he tasted her. It brought to mind how he’d attend to other parts of her body if only…

  If only she had made a different decision all those years ago. If only she had been braver or less desperate. If only she had been able to see into the future to this moment, when he was offering her the world.

  Her mind drifted back to the exact second when she could have changed it all. Changed her fate…

  Agent Zoelner was in the building. She had seen him shuffle into her boss’s office for a brief moment before he’d made his way down the long hall to knock on the door of the director of the CIA. His head had been low, his shoulders hunched, looking like he had aged ten years in the two days it had taken him to return from Afghanistan.

  Chelsea sat at her desk on the edge of a veritable sea of desks, and the sound of her fellow analysts click-clacking at their keyboards was a constant chatter that matched the racing beat of her heart. Her legs quivered. Muscles in her thighs twitched with an eagerness to stand.

  She almost did it. She almost jumped from her desk to follow Dagan into the director’s office and spill the whole sorry, sordid tale. But something held her back.

  She recognized that something as fear. Pure and simple. Fear that what Ted Edens, her boss and the director of the Office of Advanced Analytics, had threatened her with would come true. Then where would she be? Where would her mother be?

  Some place other than the house she adored, that was for sure. Some place that didn’t hold the mementoes and spirit of the man they had both loved to distraction. Some place that had no meaning, no memories, no soul. Some place that wasn’t…home.

  It was that fear, fear of losing what she and her mother were working so hard to keep, that held Chelsea in her chair.

  The seconds dragged by like hours. Her own saliva soured in her mouth. And then the director’s door opened and Dagan walked out. He was white as a ghost, a muscle sawing in his jaw.

  Two security guards converged on him. One of them indicated with a hand that Dagan was to follow them. Chelsea suffered no delusions that their destination was beyond the walls of Langley, and that Dagan Zoelner would never set foot in the hallowed halls again.

  Edens had convinced the director to fire him! How could he have done that? How could he?

  Curling her fingers around the edge of her chair, Chelsea watched with burning eyes as Dagan was escorted down the hall and across the room. When h
e walked by her desk, she suddenly found herself on her feet, her mouth open and two words spilling out: “Agent Zoelner?”

  He stopped to look at her. The fluorescent lights overhead were no friend to the bags beneath his eyes. She absently wondered if he had slept since it had happened.

  “Agent Duvall?” he asked absently. “Something I can do for you?”

  “I—” she began but was cut off by one of the security guards.

  “Sorry, Agent Duvall.” His name was Larry…Something. “I’m supposed to escort Agent Zoelner from the building immediately. He’s to go nowhere and talk to no one along the way.”

  Chelsea swallowed past the mountain of a lump in her throat. The words were there, the confession was right there, poised on the tip of her tongue.

  Then the sound of someone clearing his throat had her turning. Her boss leaned against his office doorjamb, arms crossed, eyes narrowed. And she knew… He would make good on his promise. He would ruin her as easily as he had just ruined Dagan.

  She turned back as a wave of horror engulfed her. It was followed quickly by a swell of disgust. And then, right behind those two soul-crushing tsunamis, came a tide of self-loathing.

  Dagan stared at her for a long moment. She thought she could actually hear the clock on the wall ticking away the seconds, even above the rattle of fifty keyboards and the sound of her own blood rushing through her ears. The look on his face broke her low-down, no-good, cowardly heart. Just broke it in two and then stomped on the pieces until they shattered.

  “Good knowing you, Agent Duvall.” Dagan tipped his chin, allowing the guards to accompany him from the room.

  She watched him go, watched his broad back disappear behind the opaque glass doors. It felt like her world had been turned upside down. She had the sneaking suspicion it would never be set right again.

  “Chelsea,” Dagan breathed her name against her lips, dragging her back to the present, to the amazing present when he held her so tightly in his arms.