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Falcon had braided her hair, cursing the thin chains her hairdresser had woven through the curls as he plucked them free. Surprisingly, he hadn’t damaged a single one of the little trinkets that he’d dropped into her palm.
The long, heavy mass of hair was neatly confined from the crown of her head to the middle of her back, showing off her high cheekbones, slightly tilted witchy eyes, and pouty lips that were thinner now with displeasure.
“What is this?” Lifting her gaze from the note to meet his, Summer stared back at him with a level, demanding look. “And why are we suddenly worried your father’s going to kill me, Raeg?”
Her expression was cool, almost knowing, the persona she pulled around herself as Belle, revealing the highly capable
agent she actually was. She had the ability to do that, to separate the agent from the woman, to become the cool, deadly powerhouse determined to survive and complete the mission at all costs.
And that was the woman he was facing, Raeg realized. This wasn’t the woman he’d gotten used to over the past two weeks. The softer, sometimes emotional, always sensual lover who blew his mind in her acceptance of both him and Falcon.
She was the agent Raeg had refused to accept for so many years because the last agent he’d allowed into his heart had betrayed not just him, but his brother as well, in her attempt to learn the location of a man so dangerous that his own country had feared him. Even now, more than a decade later, his enemies in Spain were still searching for him.
“What is going on?” she demanded when no one spoke.
Her hands held the assault rifle with steady confidence, but as he stared back at her, Raeg could see the anger that flickered in the back of her gem-hard violet gaze.
“Might as well tell her. That secret was never as buried as you thought it was, Raeg,” her father told him softly from where he stood on the other side of the room. “You tell her, or I will.”
Because she was in danger now. Because Cyclops knew his sons would give their own lives for her, and that alone made her a weakness as far as their father was concerned.
“You knew him,” Summer accused her father then. “You knew things about Raeg and Falcon you never shared with me.” The promise of a later confrontation filled her face as she shot her father a hard look.
Raeg had a feeling Cal wanted to roll his eyes at his daughter.
“Girl, sometimes a man needs his secrets just to keep his own sanity,” her father snorted, the hard purpose in his gaze assuring his daughter he didn’t regret his decision. “But now, the time for this secret has come.” His head turned, his stare slicing into Raeg once again, then into Falcon. “The time for it came when you made the decision to involve her in that part of your lives.”
When they’d made the decision to become her lovers. The accusation, though unsaid, came through loud and clear.
“Cal’s right,” Falcon breathed out roughly as he stood behind Raeg. “But now isn’t the time to explain it.”
Not here where Summer was less secure, where the stench of blood and death permeated every corner of the room, Raeg thought in disgust.
Not here where the proof of Cyclops’s icy competence was more apparent than ever before and where he had to stare at his father’s efficiency in eliminating anyone or anything he deemed a threat.
God, how he’d fought not to become a part of the “shadow world,” as he called it. Falcon had tried to stay out of it too, but the fiery, adventurous nature he possessed had responded to the pull of the secretive, dangerous life both of them abhorred.
That was the reason Falcon had opened the security agency, Raeg knew. A way to be a part of that life, but separate from it. To pick how deep he stepped into the shadows, and what secrets he’d come away with.
Raeg had denounced it completely, yet, he’d ended up working for two shadow agents who were even more adept at hiding in plain sight than his parents had been. Davis Allen and Margot Hampstead.
He worked for them, he reminded himself, he wasn’t one of them. That thought remained with him as they began searching the room while one of the Special Forces agents contacted his commander to request cleanup and transport to a clinic for the young girl sitting still and silent on the other side of the room.
This wasn’t something the world needed to know about. The assassination of a top Russian mobster related by blood to the Russian Ambassador to the United States could have serious political consequences if it wasn’t handled just right.
Once Cal and Caleb Calhoun determined there was nothing in the hunting lodge that could possibly tie any of them to the Russian’s death’s, he left two soldiers to wait for cleanup and gave the order to load up and head out.
The fact that he didn’t want Summer or his sons there once cleanup arrived was more than apparent. The world might not know what happened, but someone within that shadow world would receive a report, and having his children’s names in that report wasn’t something Cal wanted, and Raeg couldn’t blame him.
The shadows were filled with rogues and monsters in disguise. He and Falcon knew that one from experience, and evidently, Cal was well aware of it too.
They weren’t going to explain a damned thing to her, Summer thought as she pulled on soft lounging pants and a matching camisole several hours later.
Unwrapping her hair from the towel she’d put around it, she tried to still her anger at the thought of everything they were hiding. All the time that they’d spent in her bed, that they’d bound her heart to them, and still they had no intentions of telling her why they couldn’t stay.
No, why they wouldn’t stay.
The story Steven had related to her was terrible, she admitted, and she understood their fears to a point. But just to a point.
