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Naked.
“No,” I told myself. I was not going to try to take a peek through the keyhole. Absolutely not. Just no way.
Someone up there showed me some mercy for once because my phone suddenly buzzed with a new text, saving me from myself.
Ur scaring me now. Where R U? said Patricia’s fifth text. Hunter had texted, too—four times. And Eva five.
Shit.
I hadn’t told them that I wouldn’t be at work today. I hadn’t told anybody anything!
I sat down on the bed again and started a reply to all three of them.
Guys, I took the week off. I have some personal stuff to take care of. I’ll tell u all about it when I get back. K?
They were so not going to buy it. They’d know something was up—I never took days off, as the Chief so kindly noted the day before.
My God, it was just the day before. It felt like weeks had passed since I watched Dominic break Mathews’s leg with that bat. Instead, it wasn’t even twenty-four hours ago.
But before any of them could reply, he came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel. Around his hips. And his torso was naked and drops of water hung onto his skin like dew on the leaves and flower petals at dawn. And his muscles were right there, perfectly defined, perfectly…perfect.
Did I mention that his hair was wet, and it was standing in all directions, and some drops of water were hanging onto his lashes, and some on his lips, too?
He raised a brow, and I realized I’d been staring at him with my mouth wide open for God knows how long.
Oh, no. I stood up, so mortified I probably resembled a flamingo.
“I’m gonna go look for chocolate,” I mumbled, and with my head down, I walked out of the room as fast as my legs could carry me.
When Dominic said the crew,I imagined a couple agents, three at the most, come to brief us, put microphones or cameras in our clothes, and leave.
What I was actually seeing in front of me now was completely different.
The blinds were drawn all the way, blocking the view of the city. The living room had been completely rearranged—the furniture pushed to the side, the breakfast table in the middle with four laptops over it, the vase full of those beautiful roses forgotten in a corner somewhere, some petals on the floor. Seven people were in there with us, five men and two women dressed in black suits, carrying guns in their holsters. I’d shot guns before, but I had never carried one with me because the agents only took weapons when they left the office to go hunting.
Dominic was in the middle of it all, talking to them, checking out the laptop screens, making plans about the best place to position the snipers, and the rest of the agents who were going to be dressed as civilians and stick close to us at all times.
As I sat there eating the last chocolate from the minibar—coconut flavored, hence why I’d saved it for last—I realized that I was way out of my depth.
The realization paralyzed me—Dominic Dane had been right.
I didn’t have the experience for this kind of mission. I didn’t have the skills. And compared to these people here, I really, truly was tiny.
Tears pricked my eyes, but I held them back. I reminded myself what this was in the first place, what I’d been doing for the past two years, how many times I’d analyzed missions and studied agent reports. In theory, I knew exactly how all of this worked.
In practice, however…
Someone knocked on the door.
Every person in the living room froze in their place.
Then, one of the women said, “It’s just Sandra,” and she went to answer.
Dominic kept looking my way every few minutes, as if he wanted to make sure that I was still there, that I hadn’t somehow disappeared. God knew I wanted to, but I would never give him the satisfaction. I was doing this one way or the other because the only way to find out how this worked in practice was to actually participate in the mission.
“Oh, my,” a woman said, her voice high-pitched. When I turned, I saw that she was looking right at me.
I stood up from the couch and smiled. “Hi.”
