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“Rest then.” His hand cupped her cheek, his lips whispering across hers. “I’ll wait for you. For a while. But don’t forget to return Summer, or I’ll come looking for you.” His expression hardened then. “And you don’t want me to come looking for you.”
She had a feeling that it wouldn’t matter.
As he left the room she stared at the clothes laid out, those waiting, and she just didn’t have the energy or the patience to deal with packing. Her car had arrived earlier, and was waiting out front. All she really needed was her go bag and the small suitcase she always kept packed for emergencies.
Grabbing both, she then picked up her purse and left the bedroom without a backward glance before slipping from the house. She didn’t tell Davis Allen good-bye, and she’d already talked to Alyssa that morning. There was nothing left to do but …
Run.
* * *
Raeg watched the little black cherry Ferrari leave the estate from where he stood at the window of the senator’s office and tried to tell himself it was for the best. Just as he tried to tell himself she’d be back. He knew he was lying to himself on both fronts.
The feeling that Summer was finished with her life in DC left a heaviness in his chest he couldn’t ignore, and hunger eating at his gut.
He could still taste her against his lips and he still ached for more of her. Ached in ways no other woman had ever made him ache. And that made her dangerous. It ensured that above all other women, this one was denied him. He couldn’t allow himself to care, to allow his guard to slip, especially with a woman who had once been part of the CIA. An agent. A woman who would be perceived as the enemy. He didn’t dare endanger his own soul in such a way again. He couldn’t allow Falcon to do so, if there was a way to stop it.
Letting her go wasn’t easy though.
The scent of her still lingered in his senses, the warmth of her body was a ghostly weight teasing against his chest, teasing his memory, testing his resolve. He had a feeling that forgetting those stolen moments in her suite would be impossible and he wasn’t even certain if he wanted to forget.
He’d had a taste of the forbidden though, and now, he couldn’t help but ache for more.
Chapter
ONE
FIVE MONTHS LATER
Well now, it would appear he owed his brother a sizeable payout on the bet they had, Falcon thought in disgust.
How the hell had she managed to fool him so easily?
The last time he’d seen Summer Bartlett, aka Summer Calhoun, she’d been lying sobbing in a bed in her brother’s home in DC, long black strands of hair lying around her, her hair a neat little cap of jagged cuts no more than two or three inches long. All those long soft curls had been gone and he’d felt like a part of his heart had been cut from his chest.
He’d stomped out of the bedroom after warning her to get ready for an upcoming mission, so pissed that she’d cut her hair that he could barely stand to breathe, and it had been a damned ruse, nothing more. A trick. A carefully staged gimmick guaranteed to make him mad enough to stay away from her, for a while at least, when she slipped away again.
A month later there she stood on the balcony of a beach house she’d been staying in, nearly waist-length waves of raven black hair blowing in the ocean breeze, her slender, petite body clad only in a short nightie, allowing that breeze to caress tanned flesh as she tipped her head back in sensual enjoyment.
And she had him so damned hard it was all he could do to breathe.
“I warned you,” his brother, Raeg snorted behind him. “Summer wouldn’t cut her hair. She gets off far too easily on having you brush and braid it for her.”
He slid a look to his brother, his jaw tightening at the scathing tone of voice. There were moments he wondered what had made him believe Raeg would be the best partner for this job. Perhaps he’d made a mistake in giving his brother first choice in accompanying him to inform Summer of the coming danger and protecting her from it. There had been other options. Options that would not have been so critical of the agent Summer had been, or the woman she was.
Was he wrong, he wondered, to believe Raeg’s manner toward her held more than it appeared to on the surface? That the sensual enjoyment it seemed Raeg had found in Summer in DC was only in his own imagination?
Hell if he knew anymore.
“I didn’t ask your opinion on her reasons why, they are obvious,” he assured his half brother. “Searching for a woman with short black hair, made finding her more problematic if I continued searching for her. She would have known this.”
“The point is, she ran, Falcon,” Raeg pointed out, quite confident he knew Summer well enough to understand motivations that Falcon doubted even Summer understood. “If she gave a damn either way about how her abrupt absence affected you or anyone else, then she would have stuck around long enough to explain it.”
Yes, she had run. Just as he had known at the time that she would do.
Evidently, Summer was serious about getting out of the covert and security work she’d been a part of for so long. Just as she was serious about refusing to return to the political social center that was DC.
But Raeg was wrong, she had attempted several times to tell him she wanted out, and Falcon had been so loath to lose her that he’d talked her into staying instead. That was a mistake he should have never allowed himself to make. A mistake he would not make again.
