“When?” He leaned forward. “When did it get complicated? When you kissed me the first time? Or the second?”
“You kissed me first.”
“You kissed me like you meant it!”
His voice had risen. A woman at the next booth—yoga pants, green smoothie, laptop open—glanced over.
Dakota seemed to catch himself, jaw tightening, and lowered his voice to a harsh whisper. “You kissed me like you meant it,” he repeated. “In Melbourne. Like it was real.” He leaned back, shook his head. “Yeah, you’re really good.”
Jayden met his eyes, heat banked inside her, and threw it back at him. “You kissed me back. Didn’t you mean it?”
He swallowed. She watched his throat work, watched the conflict play across his face. Because he had. She could see it. He’d meant every moment of it, just like she had.
“I didn’t have all the facts,” he said finally.
“Well.” She sat back. “Now you do.”
Silence stretched between them—or as much silence as the Grounds allowed. Around them, the café hummed with life: the grinder whirring, a barista calling out orders. Outside, Sydney sparkled in the afternoon sun—oblivious to the wreckage happening at this corner table.
“Let me tell you what it looked like from my side,” Jayden said quietly. “I was in Fiji, tracking a threat to the summit. Chaos at the airport. Our bags lost, and this nice guy, who held my hand as our plane nearly crashed, became a friend.” Her throat tightened. “More than a friend. And then we got to Cairns and I grabbed his bag by accident.”
Dakota’s expression shifted—still guarded, but listening.
“When I opened it, I found Opera House blueprints. Security assessments. The kind of materials someone would need to plan an attack.” She held his gaze. “And the bag belonged to the man who kept showing up everywhere I went.”
His mouth tightened.
“And when he tracked me down and we changed bags, I got a bag with a sniper rifle in it.”
He flinched a little. “You saw it.”
“Of course I saw it. And I needed to know who it belonged to as much as you did. So yeah, I played the game.” Her voice fell. And here went nothing—“Until it wasn’t a game.”
“You thought I was an assassin.” His voice was flat.
“For a while.” She paused. “Not really. Not until you ditched me at the Opera House.”
Something flickered in his eyes. Guilt, maybe.
“And you thought the same thing about me.”
He drew in a breath. “When I opened your bag, I found the sniper-rifle components and female clothing. So yes . . . I wondered.”
“I’m not an assassin.”
“Neither am I.”
They looked at each other across the booth. It might have been funny in a rom-com. In real life, it shredded her. The what-ifs, the moments that she’d hoped might be forever.
But women like her didn’t get forever.
She cleared her throat. “Okay, so here we are, and it is what it is. The bag is missing—I went back to get it after our, um, breakup.”
“Is that what it was? Felt like someone just walked away.” He folded his arms.
She blew out a breath. “I had a job to do. And I couldn’t be Jayden Pierce to do it.” Her jaw tightened. “The real threat is still out there.”
Dakota was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded slowly. “So, we got intel from a breach in a Russian Bratva server. We think there’s going to be an attack at the Opera House. We just don’t know what form it’ll take.”
