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“Champ wouldn’t have kissed someone else, even on an op, without talking to Quinn about it first,” I said.
“Even so… I would… I would hate it if my…” Kev glanced over at me and then back to the monitors without finishing his sentence.
“You’d what?” I prodded.
He shrugged. “I don’t think I’d like it if the guy I was dating kissed someone else. Even for an op. I’d be too possessive.”
My heart thudded. “Even if it clearly doesn’t mean anything? It’s just business.”
Kev pursed his lips to the side as if considering it. “I don’t have much experience...” He looked directly at me with an embarrassed little shrug. “But I can’t imagine a kiss not meaning something. It would feel… dishonest, I think. And I can’t imagine dishonesty in a relationship.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d alluded to his lack of experience, and I really wanted to question him about that—preferably naked—but the second part of his sentence stopped my fantasies cold.
I can’t imagine dishonesty in a relationship.
“W-work,” I said firmly, facing the monitors once more. “Let’s get this done and go home.”
Because the sooner we were done with this op, the sooner I could figure out a way to come clean to Kev about Smitty without losing the fragile, vitally important connection that was building between us.
I should have known it wouldn’t be that simple.
13
KEV
I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d been hoping for, but Hux leaving town for three days for business—a job not at all related to the HOG case—wasn’t it.
The house seemed oddly quiet without him there, and even though he’d left Rodrigo in my care, I felt strangely disconnected from him. Maybe this was standard clingy behavior after our night together. Maybe I was being an embarrassing cliché. But I felt a clawing need for reassurance. Despite all the kind things he’d said, part of me was convinced the night together had been a fluke or the result of a bet, that somehow it hadn’t been real.
But another part of me simply wanted more. Okay, a big part of me wanted more. Much more.
Which might have been the reason I let out a loud whoop when Champ asked me to accompany him on another Horn mission to assist Hux on surveillance. This one was in a small rural town in Missouri, where someone at a boys’ school had one of the Horns on the list.
Champ, Jordan, Riggs, and I flew to a small airstrip in a nearby town, where we were met by Hux in a rented minivan. The op itself was fairly straightforward. We spent the evening hours creeping around the campus with a Wi-Fi jammer and Hux’s cell-enabled tablet to track when the Horn in question went off-line. When we finally narrowed it down to a room in the junior faculty residence hall that belonged to a Spanish teacher, Champ decided to break for the night at a nearby hotel until we could organize the op to retrieve the Horn data the following day.
Which was how Hux and I ended up staring at each other across a shared hotel room twenty minutes later, each of us poised on the edge of a double bed with a two-foot strip of carpet between us that might have been an ocean or an entire continent, it felt so vast.
Awkward.
“So… how’s your week been so far?” I asked. My fingers wanted to knot themselves together in my lap, so I forced myself to sit on them. “Your texts said it was boring, but you, ah… you look…”
Delicious?
Sexy?
Hot as hell?
All true, but all implied a certain level of expectation and neediness.
“…rested?” I tried instead.
Hux nodded slowly. “Yep. That’s true. Not much to do when you’re by yourself.”
“You could go out,” I babbled, because I was a total idiot. “I’m sure there are bars and clubs around here.” Hot guys who’d find you hot, too, if they had eyes in their heads.
“Sure,” he agreed easily. He stared at me intently. “But I didn’t.”
“Oh.” I swallowed around the ball of nerves stuck in my throat. It was still too early to go to sleep, but the only other alternative pinging around my muddled brain was to make out. Judging by the tense look on his face, Hux probably didn’t have the same idea.
“We could play Horn of Glory!” I blurted.
Hux scraped his upper lip with his bottom teeth as if trying to hide a smile. “We could…”
I scrambled for my Horn and plopped myself back down on the bed, fluffing up the pillows to make a comfy backrest against the headboard and pushing my glasses into place. “This’ll be epic. I’m challenging you to a terrain manipulation quest. First player to cross the Black-Bladed Hypnosis Quarry and capture a rebel harpy wins.”
Hux played along, rooting his Horn out of his computer bag and climbing onto the other bed. “Excellent. What’s my prize when I win?”
